True Reunion Confessions

Went to my 20th high school reunion last Friday night. Wife of Hatcher’s brother and his wife were visiting from Wisconsin, so I went stag. All the better for achieving the primary purpose of attending high school reunions – as people get older and more distant from their high school years, they are more willing to confess certain things to you that they felt those many years ago, or that they feel now in comparison to then. The confessions of formerly held convictions is easy, because when you’ve more than doubled your age, and in some cases you have your own kids approaching high school and you realize how idiotic teenagers are, you can talk about your 17 year old version of yourself like he’s a totally different person, and he is. The “now in comparison to then” confessions are slightly harder to coax, but not impossible – when you haven’t seen 98 percent of the people at the reunion for 15 to 20 years, they know there is little risk of seeing you again tomorrow, so there is very little prospect of long-term embarrassment.

I don’t go to make these confessions. I go, kick back a few cocktails, and patiently wait to receive them. Any confession that involves you personally, no matter the sentiment expressed, is a great ego stroke because it confirms your centrality or significance outside of your own ego.

So I seek out confessions of 2 varieties. The first is the “vindication” confession, and it goes something like this: “Wow! I was so superficial and shallow in high school to seek good looks and a great personality in a boyfriend. By looking at you now I see this was a colossal mistake.” The vindication confession is clearly a “now in comparison to then” confession, and it really has nothing to do with you as a high schooler; instead it’s a recognition of your obvious superior status today relative to your peers. Always good to get a vindication confession.

The second variety of confession is the “regret” confession, which expresses regret over failure to act on certain feelings held long ago. It goes something like this: “It would have killed my social life and drawn great laughter from my friends to have dated you in high school, but I found myself oddly drawn to your scrawny body, despite the acne. I just didn’t have the courage to approach you.”

It will come as no surprise that no such confessions came the Hatcher’s way, but that is not to say no confessions came my way. At my fifth reunion, I got one of the following variety: “I was always repelled by your air of smug intellectual superiority.” This was two months after starting graduate school, which was approximately 1 month and 30 days after having my air of smug intellectual superiority replaced by an air of deprecating intellectual inferiority, so I took it in good humor.

Lucky for you I got a picture of the only former classmate to make any sort of confession to me at year 20. It was from the guy in the middle of the picture – the handsome one with the Motorhead t-shirt, and the stylish hair.
The confession: “I used to think you were such an idiot in high school.” How many of you have ever had a 40 year old guy wearing a mohawk saying that they thought you were the idiot? Didn’t think so. Not exactly in-line with the type of confession I had hoped to hear at the reunion, but if I had gotten the vindication or regret confession from this guy, I would have thrown up my Chartreuse on the spot.

Being pollyanish in nature, I clung to the past tense “used to think” as a positive indication that his opinion has since changed, and it had. Apparently we were in English together senior year, and we often debated in class. He tells me that looking back, he now realizes that I was a smart cat, and that I got the better of him in most debates, but there was one time where he clearly was right and I was wrong and idiotic.

We were discussing Kafka’s Metamorphisis, a story in which the main character, Gregor Sampsa, goes to bed one night and wakes the next morning as a giant cockroach. The day prior to this discussion, as I recall, the teacher had taken me aside and took me to task for not participating in class discussions, and to tell me she won’t let it go on. I couldn't risk a bad grade going on my permenant record, so as everybody is plumbing the depths of symbolism in Kafka, I am planning to make the teacher regret forcing me to participate while nominally making an effort. Of course, no one in the story knows quite how to deal with the guy who turned into a roach, and his family has to kick him out of the house to replace his income by renting his room. The story is about alienation, and how tenuous our connections to even our closest family members really are. Cheery stuff. Anyway, the teacher poses the question: who changed the least in the story?

Now for a clever student the obvious answer is to look at who changed the most on the surface (i.e. the guy who woke up as a roach) and choose him, because this is precisely the kind of crap an existentialist author like Kafka would inflict on his readers to show how clever he is. And so the Mohawk guy says precisely that – the guy was a “roach” when he went to bed, and he woke up that way. Others expressed sympathy for his situation, and contempt for the family that threw him out on his antenna. When the teacher called on the Hatcher for my opinion, I was buying none of this existentialist crap, and expressed the cold view that obviously a man who turns into a bug has changed significantly, and that if I were his father I would have called the exterminator rather than agonizing over what to do. Of course I was being an idiot, but by design. The lesson: even when I was an idiot high school, I was smarter than everybody. It’s enough to give a guy his air of smug intellectual superiority back.