When the 'R word' is not recession, but reunion
Many years ago, 47 to be exact, I found myself on a bus with a bunch of Irish students who passed the time with a never-ending string of rowdy songs.
One of the songs was called The Wild West Show. It features, among other things, the wheretheheckarewe tribe.
The wheretheheckarewe tribe?
Yes, the wheretheheckarewe tribe — a group of people lost in grass taller than they, and wondering where the heck they are.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago, and here I was on the plane to reconnect with my very own wheretheheckarewe tribe of long ago: the first graduates, back in 1975, of the University of Western Ontario's now-defunct master's degree in journalism.
I wasn't sure what to expect, so I did the obvious thing — I Googled the word "reunion."
I'm not sure how helpful it was.
Apprehension and relief
Psychology Today, for example, has any number of articles quoting experts on all the reunion cliches you can think of — from the initial apprehension and downright angst to the eventual "why not," and the final "what was I afraid of; best thing ever."
An article by American etiquette expert Diane Gottsman even provides a list of dos and don'ts.
Don't brag — be yourself. Don't replay old roles — remember who you are today.
The consensus is that reunions present unique opportunities for personal growth.
Shannon Bradley-Collery, in a recent column for the Huffington Post, talks about the chance to "confront what needs to be confronted."
Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz, writing in the Chicago Tribune, comments that "the insecurities of the past get thrust into the present."
Even the phrase "seize the day" comes up, the old advice by the Roman poet Horace to seize the knowns of today in order to get a better handle on the unknowns of tomorrow.
Good advice when you go to your first high school reunion and still have more than half a lifetime of destiny left to mess around with.
Young and old, told and untold
In our case, the dozen or so seniors who met for a drink at Jack Astor's in downtown London, Ont., on a recent Friday, it no longer seemed to apply.
Some of us had changed beyond recognition, some of us not at all, yet it made no difference. We met on the surface of a mirror which reflected us as both young and old, as told and untold, confirmed and unconfirmed, not unlike Siamese twins joined at the soles of their feet by timeless identity.
Some of us had changed beyond recognition, some of us not at all, yet it made no difference
"Beloved strangers" comes to mind as I see us all waltzing our pasts and presents across this magic floor.
So we reminisced.
The biggest reminiscence I seem to have left is the panic I caused when, like Alice in Wonderland, I ingested a forbidden substance and left the party to which we'd all been invited in the middle of an ice storm.
Like Alice again, I saw strange and wonderful things as I got lost and the others went looking for me. I remember my called-out name playing hide and seek with me through glitter-encrusted streets and back alleys, past crystal trees and diamond power poles and street lights gushing liquid mother of pearl.
Drowning arms will reach for anything
The year at Western was one of the toughest of my life. I was 29 years old, equipped with a B.Sc. in zoology and a half-hearted attempt at a Ph.D. in paleontology, but confused and at the end of my wits.
A friend suggested I try my hand at journalism. Drowning arms will reach for anything.
The very first day at Western made it perfectly clear just how much I had been drowning. Thinking straight enough to pull off an honours degree in zoology had been one thing, sorting the ordinary facts of an ordinary house fire into the first two or three paragraphs of an ordinary news story quite another. The apparent simplicity of it stomped me every time.
I felt myself surrounded by a group of wide-awake, mostly younger, brighter, more informed, more capable people and in some cases already half-accomplished journalists.
As much as I liked them and yearned for their friendships, they frightened me.
It took me a while to get over myself and realize that most of them were going through much the same experience. And that, not our individual struggles, was what brought us together again so many years later.
And here we were, the old wheretheheckarewe tribe, gathered on the steps of Middlesex College for a 2015 repeat of the class photo taken 40 years earlier. A few were missing, some permanently, some by choice, enough anyway to show the toll time has taken.
But we were wiser, calmer, each of us with much of their life lived for better and for worse because and despite of it all, and it was all so comforting.
So zen, really, because what else is there to say except that we've made it so far and love each other for it.
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