A year ago, a classmate from high school whom I’ve kept in touch with over the years—let’s call him Willie—wondered why people keep wanting reunions. As someone who’s attended all of them, I pondered that question in the coming months. I couldn’t imagine breaking the chain. But did this mean I was obsessed with attending? Obsession, of course, is a psychic snafu of sorts that circumvents positive instincts, trancing subjects to act beyond their awareness. Was I conditioned to stalk my high school reunions? And if so, why?
Perhaps I wanted to regress to teen life, gloat in the sensation of pubescent glee. After all, I’d never attended my college or graduate school reunions.
Maybe I was in a subconscious search for the equivalent of the lost chord, values that had forever escaped me since the moment when I was suspended for cutting classes to play pool.
It may be that I figured there’d be answers to questions I hadn’t thought of. Why didn’t I become a priest when I spent too much time imagining I’d become one? Why didn’t I become an accountant after getting a degree? Perhaps I didn’t feel comfortable in cathedrals of finance or forgiveness.
Conceivably, I was curious to find out what paths the members of our class pursued. We grew up in a special moment in history when altruistic values reigned. And since our moniker was “Crusaders,” we were expected to shape our lives with principled crusades, as our president orated in the auditorium one day after the chants for Herb the janitor subsided. I had to be hopeful that the maelstrom of changes in our midst didn’t scramble the sensitivities of the potentially best and brightest of our class and breed too many Grand Inquisitors.
I must’ve had an itch to get answers to other questions I had difficulty formulating and felt a weekend retreat might be a perfect way to spawn some clarity. A perfect way to perform a Catholic reunion. Everyone can spill their guts in a kind of collective confession, while suppressing, of course, some of the more incriminating sins.
Speaking of sin, that bugaboo flashing us from cradle to grave, I possibly wanted to purge mine in a welcoming space that would get me a just absolution and a proper penance. Absolution now offers iffy, relative resolutions to the moral quagmires of our time and risks sending us to one of Dante’s more confining circles of hell, all because of a priest’s misread of the Bible’s fundamentals from spending too much time out of the box. Or, should I say, confession box?
(Flash: Perhaps I write to confess. It’s probably a catharsis of sorts, a way to expiate my sins, pay for my misguided transgressions. My recent novel, after all, focuses on an imaginary high school reunion.)
Maybe I wanted to find out why I was attracted to one of the nuns and whether that was a mortal sin. Harboring this possibility for years might’ve melted my moral compass. Sister Alice? She must’ve seeded desires that would eventually surface and demand fruition. As I discovered later, through a friend who escaped the convent after ten years, nuns who break free from spiritual bondage become acute visionaries.
Conceivably, I’d be facing up to the possibility of having wronged someone, wondering who they might be as I humbly circulated through a mostly unfamiliar crowd. That face! It’s so familiar but I can’t connect it to any semblance of a story. I cringe as I keep staring, the face like a flashing neon sign that beckons me in the middle of the night. Relax my nameless classmate, I apologize. I will eventually recall who you are.
Maybe I’d be coming to terms at last with my pubescent dating traumas. The sleepover that brought on hypersomnia. The onset of a serious case of amnesia that prevented me from picking up my date for the prom.
Speaking of dating, I had to wonder how those priests and nuns fared in the decade when all sorts of substances and values were transubstantiating. The Monday morning when the priest in our social studies class announced that he and Sister Rosanna got married over the weekend petrified my dendrites, leaving me in spiritual chaos for several weeks.
Perhaps I wanted to finally face my fears with a dose of geriatric juice, get at their source and quash them. The sense of an ending, the moment when my number might be up, had to nettle my nerve endings when the final notice appeared in my inbox. But immersing myself in this experience, ogling clear-eyed at fate, could create a new freedom and allow me to sidestep the Reaper’s trajectory.
In the following weeks, I tried to work out these conundrums in my night dreams and daydreams as I pondered whether to attend. I even thought about seeing a Confessor since a sin had to be in there somewhere. Shunting that aside, I finally consulted a seer. She was trained in existential psychology but had recently turned to the Tarot to spoon up some sensitivities about the social psyche ignored by the mind that insists that two plus two equals four is always correct. Initially, she suggested that I might be saddled with Catholic guilt and be reduced to a prattling professor, perpetually incapable of spouting worthy phrases or even recalling what I’d done. But when I didn’t pick the death card, she said I should go and see what’s happening. The reunion might fine-tune my memory, even buffer the onset of dementia, thereby keeping my identity up for grabs.
I was well-advised. The experience did regenerate my life force a bit, pushing my exit date further down the road…at least in my imagination. And nothing unexpected occurred, except for the moment a new cousin popped up next to the hors d’oeuvres table.