2020 has been the year of the cancellation. Coronavirus! Everything from jobs and school to vacations and even people have been cancelled. It’s been that kind of year. If the major events in life have been put off, you can imagine how far on the back burner the minor ones have gone.

This coming August, a couple of my schools (I attended multiple schools) had reunions planned for my class. They were biggies. Fifty years! Postponed! The fiftieth reunion has become the fifty-first. 

2020 has also become the year of Zoom. The world has gone virtual. Schools, work, family, even dating and romance has moved to the internet. Was there even Zoom a year ago? If so, did you know it existed. Now we take it for granted. Now it’s part of our everyday life.

So if all these events can be done by Zoom, why not a reunion? If twenty unruly, seven year old first graders can sit in front of their computers and learn, why can’t one hundred or so adults meet up and have a virtual reunion? Sounds like a good idea, right? Sounds easy, right? Let’s it give it try!

The 50th reunion for the class of 1970 meets up on June 7, 2020, at 4 pm central time. Make sure your devices are fully charged!

FIFTY YEARS!! Man, where did the time go. Seems like 1970 was only a few weeks ago….sometimes. At this point of our lives, we are able to look back on what we used to be. We can also look in the mirror to see what we’ve become. We see how we’ve grown. The cliques in high school no longer exist. Football players aren’t playing sports anymore. Cheerleaders aren’t shaking their pom poms. The prom king and queen are now just a regular, normal guy and girl, like the rest of us. The nerds/geeks, well….they’re still that way, but because of them we have all the technology, including Zoom, that gets us through our daily lives…so thanks for that! The different cliques get along better with each other now than they did fifty years earlier.

By the fiftieth, even the every ten year reunion has changed. I’m a lot less impressed by someone’s job, money, spouse and social status than I was at the tenth or twentieth reunion….and I wasn’t all that impressed back then. All the photos of our young children have been replaced by photos of our grandchildren. We all have experienced the same ups and downs in life. Marriages, divorces, deaths of parents, siblings and mutual friends. Life makes it easy to relate. It’s even easier when you’re with people that you have known since childhood.

So it’s four o’clock on Sunday. I turn on my laptop and find the new link to the Zoom room that was recently sent. Sounds simple, right? Hmmm…there are only a few people here. Turns out that some people were using the new link and others the original link. A reunion in two rooms. Just a minor technical issue. Welcome to 2020. You could also hear background noise. I guess not everyone muted when they weren’t speaking. I’m pretty sure not everyone even knew there was a mute button on Zoom. Welcome to 2020…again!

Eventually everyone made it into one room. Phew! I think the number of folks was between sixty to seventy. Looking around the room, there were plenty of familiar faces. There were also plenty that I haven’t thought about in five decades. There were also some that I had never heard of. I think all of that is fairly normal.

Hey look at this…..it seems like half my fourth grade class is here. There’s Gerry, Janice, Carol, Gary and Larry. Have I ever told you about fourth grade? Maybe another time…

So you’re probably wondering, how does a reunion with sixty-plus people on Zoom work? The rules were everyone got fifty seconds to tell their life story. Fifty years in fifty seconds…how clever….hmmm…I just got that as I’m typing this. Maybe that’s why my class rank was….nevermind.

I listened to the stories for about an hour. Lots of commonalities in spouses, ex-spouses, new spouses, children and the best grandchildren in the world! Lots of variety in careers ranging from doctors and lawyers to musicians and journalists…and everything in between.  After an hour, I had to go, but I heard it went on for another hour or so. The reviews I’ve read have been glowing. People loved seeing their old friends and want to do it again. They’re hopeful that others will join in the next time.

So thumbs up to the first Zoom reunion. Will this replace the in person ones? I doubt it. People will still want the live version. They’ll still want the real thing. Waving to someone on a computer will never be better than an actual hug. But, it’s 2020….hugs aren’t allowed. This is the best we can get. At least no one had to wear a mask.

Related Post: How many personal events are you missing because of the coronavirus pandemic?

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