reunion

The other night, I went to my first high-school reunion ever. It has been very nearly fifteen years since I graduated, leaving with the degree I had hoped and sometimes worked for from a school a few dozen miles from where I had grown up and my parents still live. How much the degree has helped me along I can't say but, if nothing else, it has never posed an obstacle in my long journey through higher education.

It was because of stops I'd taken along this journey, because of the migratory lifestyle I have assumed, that I had never been able to attend a reunion before. From Salt Lake, it was impossible to fly over for a night and from Grenoble it was massively inconvenient. From London, the journey took a few hours only and didn't cost the world. Add to this my sister's birthday a few days hence and a matching number of vacation days that I still had lying around, and I had all the ingredients for a lovely trip. I had been looking forward to this for a while.

The journey was epic in telling but easy and painless in reality. Every transfer was smooth and not a single means of transportation delayed. From my house, I walked a bit, took a bus, then the tube, strolled through an airport, flew for a couple of hours, strolled through another airport and took another bus before two successive trains finally took me to Riesa, the town where I used to go to high school. There, five minutes after getting off the train, I caught one of only three buses of the day going to a quaint village a few kilometers outside town where we were meeting at a restaurant that was ours for the night. I was the first to arrive; there was no one else around. A waitress assured me that I had come to the right place and served me a coffee. I threw my traveling coat behind me and let my thoughts wander.

Rolling into the station half an hour earlier, as I had done so many times as an adolescent, had brought back heaps of memories. The riveted-steel bridge and the view across the river, with the large grain silo as a dominant and highly incongruous landmark, were as I remembered them. At this point, change was still hidden from view. When the train came to a halt, I lifted my heavy bag onto the platform and then down and up the stairs, exactly as I used to. I trundled my duffel through the small station building that seemed to hail from another era. The déjà vu had an almost physical force. The station had been refurbished since I had regularly passed through it, but with modest means only. With only little imagination, I could see the past.

From the station, it used to be a laborious fifteen-minute walk along an industrial dinosaur, a steel plant that had stood through forty years of socialism with not much maintenance and no economic improvements. The dust and grime of heavy industry used to lie on what was left of the original coat of paint. Through the years that I was a student there, the steel plant closed down and was dismantled. The area was then cleaned up and turned into a business park, offering space and infrastructure for companies brave enough to invest in the east of Germany. Wide asphalt roads cut through vast stretches of optimistic lawns, but businesses were slow in coming at first.

Quite a few have arrived now, a fusion of industry and innovation. The town is far from the glory of its heyday, both in numbers of inhabitants and economic activity, but it's also clean, quiet, and rather inviting in its own way. It lies along a river that's been turned from an environmental disaster into a habitat of beavers and fishes, with green banks of unrestrained wilderness. A look outside the window, at fat happy trees and the mist of a rainy afternoon, brought me back to reality. Across the parking lot hurried a hunched figure, the dark coat pulled over his head in an attempt to keep dry. My first classmate was arriving, though it couldn't tell who he was from the distance.

In the two minutes between spotting him and his entering the ballroom of the restaurant, my heart accelerated and anticipation built up. I am still in contact with those who were my friends in school and I know what they are up to. With them I get along in the most natural way, even after being apart for years. However, in a class of nearly eighty, the majority were nothing more than fellow students, casual friends for the sake of school spirit and relaxed interactions. No strong bond had formed between me and them, and it was them that I was interested in finding out about, and a bit worried. Bragging is one of the character traits I truly detest, and I went to Riesa apprehensive that this comes natural at school reunions.

I needn't have worried. The first to walk in turned out to be a judge, and he was cool. He had not been a friend of mine; I didn't even recall his name when we shook hands, but we had a good chat about this and that and comfortably covered the twenty minutes until the next two guys arrived. With them I was friends, and the conversation took off. I switched from coffee to beer and the party started.

We ate, drank more beer, turned to tequila and gin & tonics, and the hours passed effortlessly. There were no awkward moments, it was all smiles and laughter. It was great to reconnect, especially with those that I had had contact by email only. It was good to see how we all share attitudes and values and how no one has had his or her character twisted by the intervening years. Now I'm looking forward to seeing some of my old friends more frequently, by visiting them or having them visit me in London. I don't want to wait until the next reunion to see them again.