This fall, I am supposed to travel out of town to attend my 30th high school reunion. I knew about this event 6 months, or more, prior, and now as barely a few weeks remain, I have not purchased a ticket, though I am sure I am going. Part of this is related of course to the upcoming Life Change #41: I Let My Fear of Flying Control Me. However, I can drive and take care of that, so there is other stuff at work here…and no, it is not about the reunion itself…I want to go…I plan to go, at some level, I wouldn’t miss it. I just can’t, or won’t, be bothered to plan my life around this, or any event involving traveling. And that is not unusual for me….summer vacation, holiday travel…anything like that…I can never commit.
The most pressing travel event on my radar right now is this reunion event. The Holiday season looms, and though I am sure it will be dinner time topic in the next couple of weeks, so far I have avoided any discussion---good thing too, as we still haven’t paid all the bills from summer vacation! As for the reunion—I am committing. I am taking out the checkbook, writing it out for $125.00, and even putting a stamp on the envelope…I am in. But first, I really should call a few good friends just to make sure they are going. I’d hate to spend all that money, travel all that way, and then not have them be there.
This fear of travel commitment comes up cyclically each year. Holiday travel is something I avoid at all costs, so I play the passive/aggressive card and simply cannot be bothered to make plans despite the reasonable requests of family and friends who want to know what our plans our. I have been known to throw myself behind the planning and execution of a holiday party simply to avoid rubbing elbows with the masses who find they must relocate for a week or so at the end of every year. Moreover, each summer, our departure date for the annual trek to the mountains is a date shrouded in mystery, often not becoming clearly defined until the week we actually pack up and go. I may be the only person I know that has this bad habit. Everyone else plans, I simply wait for that moment when it seems right…keeps me off airplanes, anyway.
But at least for today, I can address this. I pop the envelope into the mailbox, and instantly I am struck with the sense that perhaps no one is going. Perhaps it will be just me and a couple of guys from the marching band, hanging around some swank country club in LA, discussing different types of insurance, or reminiscing about events that none of us can recall. I never learned the art of disinterested conversation, and find it almost impossible to carry on dialogue with strangers if the object is to simply fill up the room with conversation.
I guess what most people think about prior to attending a high school reunion is their relative success when measured against their former peers. I’d guess these advance concerns are confined to the days leading up to the event, and when you actually go, you get caught up in the flora and fauna of the moment…the swirl of memory, and the chance to fill in pieces that help complete our picture of folks we have not seen in some time. The volleyball player who became a porn star…whatever happened to her? The math whiz who was synthesizing acid in high school…how did he make out? What about the old girlfriends? How do they look now? How do I look to them? Wish I had started that exercise program a few weeks (or months) earlier.
I recall the last event like this, I suppose it was my 20th high school reunion, and I was struck by the number of people who had died. Polaroid faces on a white poster board, precariously perched atop a flimsy easel… It was not a great number, perhaps 10 or 12, but it was weird to see faces of folks who did not even have the chance to consider how successful they were when balanced against the others there….it made such concerns seem pretty trivial. Why is it that money always can be made to seem trivial, but only for a few moments at a time? If I did not recognize the faces, I felt a pang, like I missed the chance to get to know them. These were someone’s son or daughter, husband or wife, and they did not get to weigh life’s great decisions, like whether or not to attend a high school reunion.
Somehow, the concept of classmates dying brings up the real reason we attend these events. Time is passing. Our time, their time, everyone in the room is a spinning clock. This is a stop along the way, specifically intended to mark the fact that the years have one by faster than anyone can imagine. This will be our 30 year reunion. Everyone will be in their late 40’s. There will be, I am guessing, even more folks that could not attend because they have passed away, and the next reunion, there will be even more. It goes without saying that is a list that none of us want to get on. But it will grow; until at some point that list is longer than the actual guest list. Cancel my tickets for that reunion.
The other reasons we go to these things is to, albeit briefly, restore contact with those “friends” you have not seen since the last reunion. I stay in contact with the people I really want to see, and in fact, I have several friends from high school I am still in regular contact with even now. Oddly, these are the same people I want to make sure plan to attend this event. I don’t want to be there without them, and yet, since I see them, and talk to them on a regular basis, I know what they are doing, how their kids are, what kind of house they live in, how many times they have been married…why waste time and money driving 500 miles to see them? And yet the experience would somehow seem quite empty without sharing it with them…so we can laugh about it later…discuss who looked great, who looked not so great, and who made the greatest fool of themselves (typically a result of sticking too close to the bartender). My reunion posse. Hope they can make it.
Just as the reunions of our lives mark time, so do the other “travels” I so vigilantly avoid planning. The holidays are essentially a yearly reunion we have with ourselves, as we pull out the same ornaments to place on this year’s tree, or gather in groups to celebrate the purchase of a new calendar, and make promises about how this year will be different. I can do all that at home, thank you. I do not need to stuff presents and winter clothes into the “closed and locked upper bin” or the back of the SUV. I do not need to battle weather, and traffic, and sleep on my in-law’s couch in order to enjoy the holidays.
Summer vacation. Two simple words, that when placed together perhaps describe the most perfect event on the calendar. I delay committing to it, I already know why-- because I love the notion that it is still to come, as opposed to having just ended. Summer vacation has it all…the weather is usually good, if you favor blue skies, warm weather, beach/pool play, scantily clad women, warm nights and long days of ample sunlight. Summer vacation has a meandering quality to it. Not scheduled around a day or date as the winter holidays, and there is often no objective (like shopping or decorating or shoveling snow). Summer is more about drinking a beer around a roaring campfire, or sitting on a boat dock listening to the splash of water against the moss covered wood. There is plenty of time to get to everything, because the agenda is short, and there is still lots of time left in the day. That said, the saddest day of the year is the last day of summer vacation. The ringing of the school bell, back to work, and the worst thing of all, almost a year before it rolls around again…a year to wait…far too long.
So as much as I look forward to it, I would far rather look forward to it, than rue its passing. So as it nears…as June gives way to July on the calendar, I begin to savor it. Like Charlie opening that first chocolate bar his grandpa bought for him on his birthday…morsel by morsel, I allow myself just a taste. Putting off planning it means it is still not here, and it sits, like an unopened present under the Christmas tree…full of potential, full of surprise. And when it does arrive, it’s a bit like that last day of school each year, when the binder paper can be thrown into the air, the assignment folder discarded into the dumpster. Homework left undone would simply have to stay that way.
So how many summer vacations do we get in a lifetime? 50, 60…70? Not nearly enough, I’d surmise. How many until they put us on the”definitely will not be attending” list at the reunion. How many Christmas trees will we decorate? How many calendars do we own in a lifetime? And what does any of this have to do with planning to travel?
In the end, I think my avoidance stems from not wanting to acknowledge that another year has gone by…I still have a lengthy to do list from last year. So much of MY travel involves ritual and tradition. Perhaps if I had a jetsetter job where I have to be in Paris for dinner and Milan for breakfast the next day, it would become second nature, and I would be able to get out one of the calendars I purchase along the way, and pick a date to be wherever I need to be. I wouldn’t worry about who would be there, or what I might miss if I depart from Northern California for a few days (an earthquake perhaps? See Life Change #21: I Have Let Our Earthquake Survival Kit Fall into Disrepair).
My fondest travels have always been those that had no strict itinerary. Those road trips without a clear beginning or end, where you linger in one place it feels right, and pass quickly from places that don’t offer much comfort. Perhaps that is why I procrastinate. I don’t like to lose that flexibility. An itinerary assumes everything has gone just as planned, and it seems, for me, nothing ever goes just as planned. How in the world can I know if I will be able to be at the airport on Oct 15th at 9:30? How can I be sure if I will be home next Thursday if I am driving through Yellowstone today? What if I like it? What if I want to stay? What if something better comes along? What if my car is surrounded by 861 bison, in front and behind and all over the road ahead and I must sit there until they have moved along? I could never quite commit to where I will be or how I will feel at some arbitrary date down the road. Who knows, I might even be one of those folks that can’t make the reunion.
But for now, for me, I will make that reunion, and if that goes well, I will try and layout my plans for the holidays, just so long as I get to sleep in my own bed.
Update on Previous Life Changes (Day Five):
A curious, unexpected surprise: since I have begun regularly exercising, and drinking so much water, I find that I have been drinking less coffee. In fact today, I actually made less of it, after dumping more than a little of it out into the sink the last couple of mornings. Could there be a connection? Or is it because I have stopped swearing? Are coffee and cursing connected? Happily, I got in my exercise, my water, didn’t swear (much), and against all odds, managed to avoid smoking. Didn’t get anyone to stop though, either. I kind of pushed things on the exercise front -- just shy of 40 minutes which seems a positive development.
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