Reunions

Things are getting back to normal, now that my parents have left, we're not pregnant, and work and childcare are keeping us busy. We have generally tried to give ourselves a few hours to ourselves on Saturday mornings by having our nanny come then, to catch up on work or errands or just sleep, but due to vacations and holidays it had been a few weeks since we had Saturday coverage, and this morning was the first real break I've had in a while. It was nice. I dropped off some packages and went to the bank to cash some savings bonds from the 80s and 90s that had stopped earning interest, and took a short nap. But then it was back to responsibility again.

I'm also helping plan a 20 year reunion for my high school class this summer, which has been interesting. It all started because my wife wanted to go to her 20 year reunion, which was postponed due to the pandemic, and since we are from the same town and it was my actual 20 year reunion year, when I heard rumblings from my class on Facebook about planning a reunion, I proposed that we pick the same weekend as my wife's reunion so that there could be cross-class coordination and mingling. From there, people started asking who was responsible for planning our reunion, and a few people volunteered to help, so I just started a group chat with them and contacted the 2001 and 2000 committees and sort of launched our committee and got deeper and deeper from there. I'm still trying to not take the leading edge of responsibility for planning everything, and it's been interesting to work with other committee members I haven't seen in 20 years and who were in different social groups from mine in high school, but we've proven to be a good team, and things are falling into place. I've facilitated by setting up ticket sales and managing all the finances, which means that others on the committee don't have to feel financially extended about it. It's only going to cost a few thousand to put on, since it's in a second-tier city in the Midwest, and although I've already made some of it up in ticket sales, it's possible we will operate at a loss, which I've decided to cover. But we'll see, maybe we will come out ahead if a lot of people attend.

But it got me thinking about how much goodwill I have toward my high school classmates compared to my college classmates. I never really fit in in college, and although I made a few friends through choir, I don't keep in touch with any of my roommates, let alone most of my classmates, and have never had any desire to attend a college reunion. I always felt alone and on the outside at that elite institution, and although I would like to go and wander my old haunts to feel that age again for a minute, I want to do it on my own terms with my family and not under pressure to socialize with people I never socialized with in the first place, or donate money to a school that for the most part made me miserable. There's a lot about college that I wouldn't want to relive. 

I was drawn back there a little bit last week because I actually connected for coffee with a choirmate who was in town. He wasn't a close friend at the time, but we crossed paths because he became an attorney as well and happened to be opposite me on a negotiation (although really he was more in the background than the partner on his team), and I reached out on LinkedIn afterward to reconnect on a more personal level. We talked a little bit from there, and he said he'd reach out when he visited the bay area for work, and lo and behold, he did! We didn't really talk about old times much, because we had more in common to discuss about our current jobs and our respective law firms and careers. But it made me a little anxious to revisit that era of my life that way. 

It was nice to start to make a new friend of him though. It's a bit lonely being a married parent, and I don't meet a lot of people socially outside of work. It's not a huge gap, because I do feel enriched by my work colleagues and relationships, and my family is really my focus outside of work, but most of my friends are old friends and not in frequent contact anymore. It would be nice to have a close friendship again. I don't think this particular friendship will be particularly close, but it was just refreshing in a way to re-meet him at this new stage of life and have some things in common to talk about.

That's where I'll leave it tonight. Tomorrow is Father's Day! I'm not expecting great things, but it's nice being a dad.