Are Reunions Obsolete? By Val Cavalheri

In 1971, when I graduated from high school, we were almost two decades away from hearing AOL’s iconic ‘You’ve Got Mail’ and 30 years from Myspace becoming the first social network to reach a global audience launching the social media phenomena. If we wanted to get in touch with high school friends, we relied on the post office to get our letters across the country, and if people moved, the chances of us finding out their new address was challenging, at best. And what about those long-distance phone rates! 

I remember our first reunion, seeing people I hadn’t connected with since our graduation ten years earlier. It was fun catching up on the jobs, marriages, babies, and, gasp, even some divorces. We spoke about how much we changed, yet how much we were still the same. Remember the photographer hired to take pictures of everyone and then waiting weeks to receive a copy of the photo?

With the dawning of the computer age, our workplaces began to use methods such as faxes and emails that allowed businesses to exchange data almost instantaneously. The rest of the world soon caught on, and networking was born. By 2004, Facebook was launched and became an integral part of our world, opening up an entirely new way of connecting with friends and others we wanted to meet. 

I was an early social media nerd, collecting people like a philatelist collects stamps. It was fun finding people you knew from around the neighborhood and then expanding from there. I don’t remember which of my Nottingham friends I first found or who found me so many years ago. But that connection led to others from my graduating class who knew others from other years, etc. 

As the years went by, we laid out our lives in the daily commentary of our online social interactions. We knew the status of our relationships and the names of our pets. We celebrated the birth of children and then grandchildren, sent messages of support for health scares, condolence for the loss of loved ones, and ‘unfriended’ those whose philosophy on life or politics did not align with ours. We followed the successes of former classmates and bought pictures they had painted and read books they had authored. We wished each other happy birthdays and happy anniversaries. We took selfies. 

In the overwhelming presence of social media, we knew a lot about each other.

Then the pandemic hit. Like the scheduled graduations, marriages, and get-togethers, our 50th-year reunion was put on hold in 2021. Spending much more time at home, and being part of the high school reunion committee, meant that suddenly I was in touch with even more people from school, reconnecting with those with whom we once again shared a similar experience. This time instead of comparing teachers and classes, we compared our pandemic experience. Zoom burst on the scene as well, and I found myself face to face with people I hadn’t seen in decades, even though I had been communicating with them quite frequently on social media.

There is, of course, a danger to this oversharing of our lives. Because if you think about it, is there a reason to have a reunion and want to see the people whose lives you’ve seen played out on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter day-after-day?

My own children’s 10th-year reunions have come and gone. They did not attend, and why would they? Graduating classes in the electronic age have found them to be a dying/dead tradition. There is no longer a need for reunions, in the sense that we once thought of them. Is there any mystery left when everyone knows what you’ve been doing?

But here is the thing. Come September, my class has planned to meet for our delayed 50th. Big events are in the works. Original members of the rock band from our class are busy practicing for a knock-out performance of music we used to dance to and will dance to again. There is talk of other surprise appearances. 

Nostalgia is why I’ll be there. It will be a throwback to a different time with a different feel—a pre-pandemic period when we were younger and united in our stand on social issues. I bet we will laugh a lot because we already know each other so much better than we did at our first or even second reunion. We can bypass the small talk and jump right in. There will be no need to show how much we’ve changed, nor how we have reinvented ourselves. We know what we look like now. We know each other. We also know that there is no guarantee that we’ll be around to attend the next one–if there is one. 

We are now part of a generation that is very aware that after this reunion is over, we can get in touch via Instant Messenger, instant video, Zoom, text, FaceTime, MyApp with anyone anywhere around the world without additional cost or effort. We also expect that there will be photos from the event posted on social media before we even leave the venue.

Just in case, I’ll bring my camera.

Val Cavalheri is a recent transplant to the Eastern Shore, having lived in Northern Virginia for the past 20 years. She’s been a writer, editor and professional photographer for various publications, including the Washington Post.