My 40th High School Reunion

One of my favorite moments during my 40th high school reunion this weekend was so flickeringly brief that I doubt the other parties even remember it now. Before I continue, a note: the one mandatory item at 40-year reunions is nametags for everyone. Even if we more or less look like ourselves, it is now forty years later, and most of us are older than our parents were when we were in high school. At the reception that evening, I noticed that at first most of us pretended to not look at the nametags but after a half-hour all pretense was gone and I saw many of us walk up to a new conversation partner, lean forward, squint, and say, “Oh! Mark!” or whichever name.

My favorite moment came during the dinner/dance party in a club near our old school, Spackenkill High School (seen above), when the eighty or ninety of us were in full churn, combining and recombining into old cliques and new conversations (to my classmates’ credit, there were more new conversations than old cliques). With the help of a classmate, I’d found a bottle of water for dinner. It is possible that I owe this friend money for the water, as it came from the bar, and my actions turned it into a free bottle: I took it, said thanks, and headed back to my table, as oblivious as I was when I was fifteen. As I walked with the bottle past a table with two women at it, they each said, “Hi, Mark,” without looking up from their close conversation.

Neither ignored nor invited, I continued to my seat, and reflected that this could have been a moment in our school cafeteria in 1983 as easily as what it was now in 2026: two classmates acknowledging me without the need to invite me into their deep conversation. It felt like belonging somewhere, it felt like I belonged, which I never felt when I was a teenager, except maybe on stage.

Like an oblivious fifteen-year-old, when this thought came to me I wanted to go over to their table and share it with the two women, which would have both interrupted their moment and sundered my quiet feeling of belonging. I didn’t go anywhere. There was food in front of me that was far superior to high school cafeteria food.

This was the first reunion of any sort that I’ve attended. Even though I live somewhat close to my hometown, I think my name has been on the “We Don’t Know Where They Are” list for thirty-nine consecutive years, likely because in previous years those who put together any reunion-type event hadn’t been part of the social circles I’d been in in high school. (I was not popular.) Anyway, I learned that most of our past reunions were smaller. This year was the first big reunion, and the planning started some two years ago, which was when a classmate first reached out to me about it.

That gave me the sweet chance to have anxiety about the event for two whole years rather than a mere couple of months. Of course, as with all things about which I feel anxiety, I needn’t have.

For many years, I’ve wanted to walk around my high school one more time or one last time, and we were given a tour by the current principal of the school, who happened to have been born in 1986, our graduation year.

Here in 2026, I’ve recently enjoyed several opportunities to rethink, revise, and even drop entirely some of the stories about me that I have told myself for decades. We all need to do this sometimes.

It happened again at the reunion. During the tour of the school, we visited the auditorium, and a classmate and I found our way through a backstage crowded with musical instruments (how many kettledrums does one school need? I thought to myself), through the curtain (the same one from the 1980s?), and onto the stage itself, the stage on which I’d spent so many hours. I’d been in eight plays and several other productions on that stage, including some sketch comedy nights senior year in which I wrote and starred in the sketches. The most intense hours of my youth, the best times of my life, oh so many memories, blah blah blah, etc. I grew teary-eyed, which is a symptom of being 57.

The feelings were in fact intense and vivid. Beside me on the stage, the classmate recounted a couple memories of us in plays together. Whatever reverie I was in ended as if he’d snapped his fingers in my face: I didn’t remember this classmate in plays with me. I didn’t remember wearing a chef’s hat in the restaurant scene in “Hello Dolly.” (That was the memory he shared.) Through the years, my own memories of my own life had deleted this person. Someone else backstage listed all the plays that he had worked on as a set-builder, the same plays I’d been in. He also wasn’t in my memories of my favorite part of high school.

In a split-second, my memories of high school were enriched. More faces and anecdotes were added. If years have themes to them, this has been my 2026 thus far. Life sometimes gives us the chance to revise and re-understand one’s experiences. I wouldn’t have known this had I allowed myself to remain on the “We Don’t Known Where They Are” list. It was one more lesson learned in Spackenkill High School, forty years on.

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Mark Aldrich is an award-winning humor columnist and a writer/performer with the Magnificent Glass Pelican radio comedy improv group, which just completed its thirty-fifth season: