7 Rules: Surviving a High School Reunion

November 02, 2011, By Craig J. Heimbuch 1 comment

Craig J. Heimbuch

I skipped out on my 10-year reunion. Or, maybe I didn't skip out. Maybe I didn't know it was happening. Maybe I would have gone had I known to go. It's hard to tell. All that is to say that when the e-vite showed up in my inbox for the 15-year reunion, I clicked that I would attend without thinking—an impulse out of character for me. I was committed.

I don't have any high school horror stories. Never embarassed myself at prom or blew up a science lab. Nor do I have a whole lot of glory stories. I never won the big game or served in a class office. High school was just the period in my life between junior high and college. When I moved away, I left most of it behind. I married the girl I fell in love with right before graduation and had an occasional beer with classmates—not necessarily friends—who went to the same college. But in the 15 years since, high school has become little more than a dusty box of mental photos. 

So why was replying my attendence so automatic? I can't quite say, but as the weeks wore on and the date of the reunion approached, I started getting a little nervous. Not full-on anxious, just nervous. In so many ways, high school reunions are an artificial social construct. If you have remained close with your high school friends, you don't really need a reunion, and it ends up serving as a way to pass a few awkward hours with the people you graduated with but with whom you share no social history. If you didn't, then you're going to surround yourself with people who share with you only a coincidental geographical past.

Basically, you're walking into a hazy dream with sort of familiar (though mostly chubbier) faces and loose connections to names, locker numbers and class periods. If you're lucky, details will come back to you. If you're not, well, then the evening will be an exercise in the kind of room-working usually reserved for Congressmen during election years and presidents of the Chamber of Commerce. 

Here are a few rules for making the most out of your high school reunion.

Rule #1 Find a Sherpa

Unless you still live in your home town, you've probably lost touch with your classmates. For my reunion, I could remember the names and rough faces of perhaps 12 of my nearly 200 classmates. I knew I was in for a lot of awkward pauses as I searched my memory to place the name on the badge pinned to a stranger's sweater. I did, however, remember that one of the guys I played tennis with still lived in town, so I looked him up on Facebook before the reunion. Based on his pictures and posts, he kept in touch with a lot of the old classmates—he was a connector and was the perfect kind of person to hook up with for the reunion. Facebook is the great social lubricant of the millenium. Look up an old friend ahead of time and make arrangements to meet prior to the reunion itself. Have dinner, have a drink, get caught up and be honest about your memory lapses. Go to the reunion together and use this person as your guide. The buddy system is best. Of course, if you're married to a connector, that's helpful, but if not, go looking for one. It will make things smoother.

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