I recently got an invite to my 20th high school reunion.
I didn’t go.
Thinking back to high school, I didn’t play football or basketball, I wasn’t the most popular kid in the class and I never went to a prom. After school I pumped gas earning minimum wage which was $3.35 an hour and worked at a radio station on weekends for $1.65 more an hour.
I didn’t care for the socializing that came along with a pep-rally and a Friday night football game and I certainly wasn’t the jock who tried to screw every girl in the class before graduating. I wasn’t on anyone’s invite list for after school activities either.
So why would I want to go to a reunion?
I could have gone to see how the hands of time wreaked havoc on people, or to see who married who, or suffer through listening to how many wonderful nose-picking, diaper-dirtying, snot-eating children these people now have. I would have loved to see how many successful or not successful people have evolved from the class of 1989.
But no. I decided, like so many times during those 4 years, to sit this dance out.
I remember when my mother died in 1995 and how many relatives I didn’t even know came out of the woodwork for the barbaric ritual of the “viewing” and the “funeral.” It was then and there that I made up my mind that when I die, there will be none of this nonsense.
A reunion is nothing more than a funeral except there’s no dead person in a box. It’s a gathering of people who didn’t want to have anything to do with you when you were alive, but felt bad enough to come see you pumped full of formaldehyde, with your lips sewn shut, wearing something you would never wear when you were alive and lying in a $6,000 container as people walk by saying “they did a really nice job on him.”
Where were these people the last 20 years and why would I want to reunite with them now? Only one or two out of a class of 100 ever made contact with me. And I didn’t go out of my way to make contact with them either. So we’ll call it even.
I guess there will be a 25th and I’m sure the plans are in the works for my college reunion as well. Save the postage, you can count me out. And don’t come to my funeral, because there won’t be one.