Simple Minds – Don’t You (Forget About Me)

On Saturday, my high school class in New York held their 30th reunion. I wasn’t there, we were up in Maine for Thanksgiving with my mother. One of my former classmates had added me to the Facebook group earlier in the fall and I was halfway tempted to go but logistically, it just didn’t make sense. Plus, I didn’t graduate from there, as we moved the summer after 10th grade, and I’m not at all sure people that hadn’t also been in elementary school with me would have remembered me.

Today there have been lots of pictures from the reunion posted to the FB group. I am silently sitting here looking at them all and wishing someone would get busy tagging everyone because, hey, not everyone looks the same as they did 30 years ago. To be sure, some people I could easily identify and for the most part, everyone looks really great for our age. They fared much better than the Maine high school reunion pictures I saw from their get together this summer.

I could have attended either or both of those reunions but one of the consequences of having split my high school years between two places is that I didn’t have enough time in either to really have a close group of friends. Typically after you graduate from high school and people go off to college in different places, you at least see your old friends when you’re all home for summer or Christmas. We did go back to New York a lot that first year but even then I could already see that the dynamics of the social scene in my class were shifting and I wasn’t going to be a part of it. It’s hard to know if we hadn’t moved if I would have been hanging with the cool kids or not. I’d like to think so but I remember feeling like I was losing my friends to the other kids who were still there. The only way for me to keep in touch was through writing letters (because long-distance phone calls were really expensive) and how many teenagers are going to do that? Not many, I can tell you. Out of sight, out of mind.

As I drive my daughter to her high school every morning, I sometimes get a little peak into what her life is like. She’ll tell me she’s got a quiz in a class that day or she’ll see someone she knows as we wait in the drop off line and tell me a little something about them. One morning she complained that high school wasn’t what she expected it to be and that “all the movies lied” because she felt they hadn’t portrayed the reality of what a slog it was. I told her she had just been watching the wrong movies because all of the high school movies from my teenage years were 100% accurate. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (’82), Sixteen Candles (’84), The Breakfast Club (’85). Am I right? Anyone? Anyone?

I think a John Hughes marathon may be in order. Which one do you think I should have her watch her first?