THE REUNION.
Well, I did something I didn’t think I would or could do, tonight. I went to a school reunion. And I’m glad I did, too.
I needed to do my preparatory tasks in the afternoon, and I had a nagging doubt in my mind as to whether I was making the right decision. I had this horrible feeling in my mind that a kid who left school before the end of Year Ten and went to another school would turn up. This kid said to me one day, “There’s another Peter Wynn, but he’s not like you. He plays football.” I am sure that if Peter Wynn the footballer heard him say that, and another footballer, Steve Mortimer, was in earshot, he would do two things. Firstly, he would say, “So? I don’t need any competition,” and then he’d say, “Come and meet a guy I have played against,” and introduce him to Steve Mortimer. Steve Mortimer has a gay son, and he’s protective of him and I’m sure Steve Mortimer would have said to the kid, “If anyone spoke about my son the way you are speaking about this other Peter Wynn, whatever I do on the field is NOTHING, compared to what I would do to them. So just bear that in mind, Son.”
There was another kid, who was in the group, with whom the bullish kid used to get into scraps, who would say equally ridiculous things about the fact that I don’t like football and would try to pressure me to do things I didn’t want to do.
Fortunately, neither of those two were at the reunion.
I realised something by attending the reunion, too. And that is that for years, I wanted to be able to deny attending my old high school and I didn’t want anybody to know that I had been there. I was aware, though, that if I said that I went to a different school, someone could well know someone else who went there and say that they didn’t know me and the school would have no record of me graduating. I wasn’t a student of another school. I realised that I belonged to the Class of 1991 at my old high school just as much as anybody else from that year.
I also had one woman there tell me that I was hard to find. What I realised there was that I was trying to hide from the wrong people. I’m remembered of my father saying that when I was a baby, my grandfather had rung him to say that an old school friend of his, who’d been doing missionary work in Papua New Guinea was home, and asked my father if he’d like to see him. This was a friend who had been a good friend, and after they’d left school, the other guy found a job as a draftsperson and my father elsewhere and my grandfather had asked the friend if he could drop my father at the train station that was on the way to the friend’s work. The friend said yes, and did it once. The next morning, his friend drove past and didn’t stop and my father rang him up that night to ask why, and the friend replied, “It’s not really convenient.” And my father never saw him again. When my father replied to my grandfather, “Not really,” my grandfather asked why, and my father said that they had nothing in common. Years later, my father said to my grandfather, “I wonder what the people from school think about me,” and my grandfather replied, “Often times the people whose opinions of you you worry about don’t think about you very much, if at all.” I would add to that, “Often times, the people who you worry wish you harm aren’t thinking about you, but the people who wish you well can’t find you to tell you.”
I remember with the first of the bullies I mentioned above, he was asking me if I liked certain people, and I didn’t really think it his business, but the only thing he was probably right about was, he said, “He’s probably tormenting someone else now that he’s changed schools.” Another person said that the person who used to bully you, if they see you and recognise you, might, rather than plotting what they’re going to do to you, might be thinking, “Oh, God, I hope that person doesn’t recognise me.”
I also had the realisation that we’re all getting older and that, sadly, some of our ranks are thinning out, albeit marginally. And, a good way to look at it is, new friends silver, old friends, gold.