The Zoom Reunion
I just left my 40th college reunion by closing my computer screen.
It was a bit like a Springsteen concert. You head to the event wondering why you go to all the trouble. And then, for the next four hours, you are on a high like no other.
Life is perfect. You are surrounded by a crowd of immediate friends, all from different backgrounds, with different skills, motivations, and experiences.
The power of shared experience is revived. Crowded dorms, late-night studying, sports, relationships - cluelessly finding your way as an 18-year-old.
And then the fun is over, and it’s back to life. With Springsteen, you want to run away with Mary in Thunder Road or cruise the Jersey Shore in the “lonely cool before dawn.’’
After a college reunion, you want to do life a bit better, refocus on what matters, keep the promise of staying in touch, fix the relationship you screwed up 40 years ago.
At their worst, reunions are a dirge of old jokes and reliving a lost youth with too much booze.
But at their best, they are a reminder of a better world, where well-meaning people commune and talk it out.
Maybe it was the timing - 40 years after we graduated in 1981. Perhaps it was the perverse intimacy of Zoom. It became more than gathering under a tent with mediocre food and bopping from table to table.
I entered the Zoom breakout “room’’ reserved for just the folks from our freshman year dorm. You are face to face but in the comfort of your home with plenty of time to ask the questions you never get to ask in a crowd.
It was a four day extravaganza of interesting, sometimes painful exploration. A poetry slam put together by a classmate I never met at college, a panel on the future of politics, a former head of the National Institute of Health talking about COVID, an old friend running a community foundation in Alaska trying to figure out the poverty that surrounds her. A Wall Street banker asking what it’s all for. A Black classmate is in the chat function talking about trauma and violence; another session about whether the liberal arts college should even exist, whether it has a place in a democratic society rife with injustice and inequality; a talk with a head of state who is our friend.
The real thrill is remeeting people, getting to know them again, and forgiving the immaturity of the past in favor of who we have become. The landscape painter you knew freshman year but never really spoke to for the next three years you promise now to visit. And now, you look at her art and wonder what was going through her head 40 years ago.
Or the composer you rarely spoke to in college now giving a recital via Zoom and then talking so honestly about how difficult it was to be gay in the 80s.
We remembered friends who died. We hugged each other virtually, the CEO in Minnesota, the judge in New Hampshire, the woodworker who never left town, the poet, the coach, the government official, the homeless advocate, the doctor changing how health care works.
Of course, the folks who show up to reunions are usually the happy ones, happy with their place in society and what they have wrought in their lives.
Many stay away because life didn’t work out. Or they don’t like crowds or hate Zoom or are just too busy and have moved on from the need to commune and relive their youth.
I served on a panel about life after 60 and admitted to a mixed relationship with my college. Is it an elite place with fabulous facilities, great professors, and a campus that can transform lives for the better? Or is it a place that still sends far too many white people to Wall Street to reinforce the very inequality we were taught to question and criticize?
No final answer this weekend. But joy was produced and felt among old friends, even love, and a commitment to get back in touch. And in these perilous times for democracy and fairness, that is something.
