What I Learned From My 10-Year High School Reunion

And how I realized my normal was anything but

Photo of Cheltenham High School Class of 2015 reunion

Throughout much of my life, I always envisioned my high school reunion taking place inside of the same building I’d graduated from. Maybe that owed to my father forcing me to watch Grosse Pointe Blank with him during my childhood, or maybe it was the TV shows and cartoons I’d seen that depicted reunions in that misleading way.

For whatever reason, I assumed that when we finally saw each other again, we’d be ambling aimlessly through our high school auditorium with red Solo cups in our hands. We would meekly stand around making small talk, gossip over which popular kids had floundered and which nerdy ones had flourished, and get tipsy to a curated playlist from the mid-2010s as former incarnations of ourselves came to the surface.

How exactly we’d persuade administrators to sell alcohol on school grounds, I hadn’t really stopped to consider. As a lifelong ambivert with a tolerance for beer that makes most sixteen-year-olds look like Hunter S. Thompson, I accepted that these drink-related dealings would simply hover above my head. Somehow, some way, we’d each arrive in our separate vehicles — sports cars, used sedans, limos, and verified jalopies all parked beside one another in telling discordance. And we’d walk through our high school doors for the first time in ten momentous years. Old habits would make ugly returns and cliques would reassemble like bands after breakups.

But when I received notice of my reunion and saw it would be taking place in a bar, it caught me by surprise. An adolescence full of unrealistic expectations clashed with the reality that we’d all be reuniting at some unfamiliar Philadelphia pub.

There were some expectations that lingered. I feared that the night might turn into a one-up contest, and we’d each spend our evenings working our way around the room, perfunctorily trading recaps on all of the things in life going right. I thought the night might devolve into drunken chaos as people succumbed to anxieties they thought they’d put behind them and began eyeing up the liquor selection. But there were enough people from my childhood I wanted to see again that I knew I’d come regardless, whatever the night had in store.

I brainstormed a few of the lines I might recite for people when they inevitably asked me, “So, how’ve you been?” But I was unprepared for the possibility that the chatter in the bar would be so electric that my mental planning would be rendered all but pointless. This was in no small part due to the turnout. So many people had RSVP’d by the night of the get-together that I suspect it caught even the two volunteers planning the night by surprise.

It seemed that in the years since high school, many of us had separately arrived at the conclusion that Cheltenham was somewhere special — and that wandering off into the professional world didn’t demand us putting an ocean between ourselves and our Alma Mater. With nearly a hundred guests crammed into a room more properly fit for forty, I was both content and a tad disappointed not to talk more intimately about the weighty ten years since high school. About the pandemic and President Trump. About TikTok, artificial intelligence, and the phones that unlock with our faces.

One of the most interesting aspects of the reunion was the level of relief and elation people found in just seeing a flood of old faces once again. What we talked about often wasn’t all that important. The careers and cities people had each landed in melded into a lovably drunken blur.

And I quickly grew to understand, not just how lucky I was for where I grew up, but for all of the people who lived there beside me — and still do. In going away to college or moving away from one’s hometown, something that often happens is that people grow to realize that their friends from back home are more a product of proximity than actual loves, passions, or traits shared in common. They accept that many of the people they’ve spent their lives with leading up to graduation were merely a result of geography.

In the decade since high school, I’d largely fallen into that perception. In college and the years beyond, geography has played no role at all in the people I choose to spend my time with. When traveling, it’s been rare for the people I befriend to have been born within 1,000 miles of my hometown. Many of them have spent their entire lives across an ocean and immersed in a culture completely foreign to me.

Yet seeing that room full of familiar faces after nearly a decade apart, I quickly grew to appreciate something about growing up in Cheltenham that I’d always taken for granted. We experienced the best of both worlds. We were born into a township teeming with many of the kinds of people we’d choose to spend our time with anyway.

I not only came of age in a wonderful place, but surrounded by wonderful people. In my time growing up in the district, it was hard to grapple with what an uncommon luxury that is. I didn’t understand that the rapport many of us had with our peers was something that many people never get to experience at that age. The people they spend their formative years with are results of location and little else.

One of the strangest features of the places we grow up is how we begin to view them as normal. Whether we’re raised to wake each day at sunrise to tend to the family farm, or to hike five laborious kilometers with a jug to the nearest well with clean water, it all just becomes a part of the life we know. It’s the others who are strangers. The people who live in every part of the world that exists outside of our small corner of it.

But one of the most humbling components of growing up and stepping beyond the bounds of our hometowns is learning that we each were brought up in different versions of bizarre. We grow up in some strange place that we trick ourselves into believing is normal.

The norm that I always knew was inside of a cultural melting pot. It hadn’t occurred to me that homogeneity was the law of the land throughout so much of the world.

Going away to college or beginning to travel internationally, there’s a culture shock that people often experience. They see a deluge of different people from different backgrounds, and the experience is mind-opening. It’s enough to make even the most small-minded conservatives into bleeding heart liberals.

But for me, it was in seeing the world that I began to comprehend what makes life in my verdant little suburb so special. It was in going off to the University of Bloomsburg that I started to truly grasp for the first time just what it meant to grow up in a town that prided itself on being made up of people from such a diverse array of backgrounds.

It hardly ever crossed my mind that, throughout so much of the planet, the population of Jews was so small that many people I’d introduce myself to had never met one before in their entire lives. That attending raucous bar and bat mitzvahs wasn’t a customary part of the average Italian, Haitian, or African American’s early adolescence.

It didn’t occur to me how rare it was to have attendance lists spread between so many different cultures that it could make teachers’ heads spin. And as an adult, I can finally stop and revel in how beautiful it is to have shared in this unique upbringing with so many people I still love today.