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Keeping track of lost time with reunions
If our time spent looking for lost things uses up great blocks of our lives, then reunions make us realize how much time has been lost.
With the nose to the grindstone, days are spent going to work, doing laundry, driving to soccer games. Time spent with distant friends is pushed to the back burners. Before you know it, a decade has passed since you have seen people which you spent every waking hour with for years during college.
While children usually have an easier chance of seeing their friends either through school, playdates, walking out their front door, adult friendships require a lot more work, especially if those friendships are strained by thousands of miles.
Those miles had caused a group of my friends from college to not see each other more than a decade, the length since anyone had gotten married. So, we purposely planned a get-together not revolving around jumping for a bridal bouquet.
When so many years elapse between get-togethers, the majority of the time is spent playing catch up. Since we only had one night together, the recollections revolved around highlights from the past year and the previous nine years were omitted. Trying to summarize 10 years is rather difficult especially since I have a hard time remembering what I wore yesterday, much less what I did five years ago.
Despite all those years apart, we learned one important fact: We hadn't changed much since college. Maybe we are boring, maybe we are predictable, maybe we are too busy chasing small children, but all of my friends and I had nearly the same hair-do we sported in college, down to the color and style.
In fact, the most notable change were the little people clinging to each person's leg. (Once a few toys were brought out, that issue disappeared along with the children.) Smaller replicas of each person would dash through the room and the parent could easily be identified.
B.C. (Before children, back-in-college), we could never have foreseen how many years would pass before we would see each other face to face. After all, these were the same people with whom hours would be spent discussing the number of stars in the sky, how many reasons there were for our term papers were not being complete, whether any fast food joints were still open.
When we gathered 10 years later, we fell into nearly the same pattern of endless questions only this time the discussions focused around the number of diapers we had changed, how many reasons we hadn't completed the baby books beyond the first child, whether anyone had eaten anything else which didn't come with its own toy in the past five years.
Reunions not only highlight how much time has passed, but the get-togethers also emphasize the unpredictability of our lives.
Countless hours were spent during college speculating (rather than studying) where we would be five, 10, 15 years after graduation: Who would be married, who would have a dozen kids, who would be traveling to visit all these married-with-children people.
The results are still coming in.
Some friends in my group were married immediately after college, while another is still in the courtship of her first serious relationship since graduation. Some brought gaggles of children to the reunion, while others continue to just play with friend's children. Some stay home with those children, while another is still in school -- still searching for that elusive career.
If my calculations are correct about how our lives would evolve, our plans were approximately 3 percent right.
After all, how do you make God laugh?
Try to make plans.