Searching for redemption at a high school reunion

22 January 2015 - 23:04 By Daniel Browde
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Daniel Browde went to his 20-year matric reunion, and found himself back in the labyrinth

Remember what happened on November 26th 1994? You might not. Next to some of the heavy-hitters from that year - April 27th, say - November 26th keeps a relatively low public profile. But for a few hundred thousand people who were 18 that year, it's a significant personal and communal milestone: that was the day we wrote our last matric exam and walked out of our high schools for (we hoped) the last time.

I spent that evening by myself at the Balfour Park shopping centre. Halfway through standard eight (today's grade 10), I'd taken a withdrawal-is-the-best-form-of-attack approach to friendship. If I didn't look like I was trying, I figured, I might seem grand. I watched a movie, Blown Away, starring Tommy Lee Jones as an Irish terrorist who wants to blow up Boston. Focused, solo, grumpy, the only difference between us was that my mom was coming to pick me up afterwards.

Outside the cinema, I ran into one of my teachers. A friendly guy, not that much older than I was, he asked me with a smile why I wasn't out partying.

I pretended to be fine with my loner status. How could I tell him that I felt like I'd just emerged from a dangerous labyrinth, that I still didn't know what to make of it or whether I'd even emerged from it at all? As he rejoined his friends, I felt a familiar embarrassment creep up, and in the car on the way home I didn't tell my mother about the incident. Adult life had begun.

So when the invitation to my 20-year high school reunion - theme: "Back to the Future"- slipped into my Facebook feed a few months ago, it took me a few seconds to decide that I probably wouldn't attend. And a few more to decide that I had to.

A million times between then and the day of the reunion I changed my mind. Why would we hold our lives and decisions up to such naked comparison?

The day of my reunion

As soon as I walked, with my wife, into the old hall, what we'd all achieved, or not, since school, was obviously beside the point. It was as if a strong pair of hands had taken my head and turned me forcefully 180 degrees, aiming my eyes straight back at the past, affording me an uninterrupted view back to 1994. This corny dinner-dance was simultaneously a mythical rite of passage: the return to the labyrinth.

I'd been back to the leafy private school in Joburg's northern suburbs before. But whenever I'd returned I'd felt, at most, a luke-warm nostalgia. The labyrinth was not the place, although it was apt that the reunion was held there. The labyrinth was the group: the 250 human beings corralled together every week-day for five years. And not just any five years: those godforsaken, tender teenage years.

I spent them (like a lot of others, I imagine) yearning for the ticket to the in-crowd. I had it at primary school, without knowing how I got it. But when I arrived at high school I suddenly didn't have it anymore - and I didn't know how to get it.

To a large degree, this fact defined my existence. Every pimple, every nerdy remark, every botched catch, I saw it move further away. Was there even a ticket? Maybe there was a password? I was lost.

What made it worse was that it sometimes felt so close. One of the A-listers would invite me to a party and I'd wonder if maybe I'd accidentally done the right thing. But it never panned out. And then I grudgingly gave up.

At the reunion, the old order rose from the past like a sea monster breaching the surface. It seemed ridiculous and horrible. And all the more horrible for how ridiculous it was. But still it cast its shadow on the room because of how powerful it once had been, and how real we had all made it by believing in it. It was the guilty secret we all shared. A terrible crime we had all blindly conspired to commit together, where we ourselves were both the perpetrators and the victims.

That crime was what we had come to face. So much was clear. I understood the compulsion I'd felt to be there: nothing less than redemption was on offer. All we had to do to receive it was to see the old order for what it was: destructive and deathly, a copy-catting of all the bleakest themes of adult society. And to recognise that it might have been different.

Sometime during the meal, I recalled a conversation I had in the sick bay with a boy named Warren Plotkin. I was there with a headache. Warren basically lived there in an ongoing protest against the timetable. That day we spoke about what we wanted to do when we finished matric. I said I wanted to be an international human rights lawyer. He said he just wanted to stick around for as long as he could.

Warren didn't come to our reunion and I didn't become an international human rights lawyer. And what I had become didn't seem to matter much amid the cellphone pictures of other people's kids, the tipsy nostalgic dancing, or the boring fundraiser's speech, during which I did, for a few seconds, think, "Why is this woman asking a bunch of teenagers for money?"

But we weren't teenagers. I remembered this gratefully as I looked around the dimly lit hall. The extra weight, the grey in the hair, the frown lines: our bodies and faces told the final story of 20 years. Along with the look in our eyes: that peculiarly grown-up mixture of hope and hopelessness that tells us we're still around.

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