This past weekend my wife and I were scheduled to attend the 100th anniversary reunion of Saskatchewan Youth Parliament in Regina.
It was a big deal in our lives, as that's where we met. Most of our friends for the past 20 or so years we knew through Youth Parliament. Many of them found their wives or husbands through the organization. (Sssshhhh! Don't tell that to any current members! They might get scared off.)
Unfortunately, our son came down with one of those mild childhood ailments that was contagious enough that we couldn't leave the kids with anyone else, and therefore our plans to attend were scrubbed. It was bittersweet seeing the various news articles about the event and not being able to attend. I guess our tickets can be considered donations.
Most reunions aren't newsworthy, but when you have an organization that includes the likes of Diefenbaker, Calvert and Goodale, the media takes notice.
Two of our close friends did attend. Steven was a former premier of Youth Parliament, and Michael was a former speaker. Michael also met his wife Angela at SYP, but she was at home with their kids and couldn't attend. Angela was a former premier.
Michael reported back that while we would have enjoyed ourselves, the only two people we would have known were Steven and him. We had spent a week at Michael's place earlier in August, and Stephen had joined us there during the visit.
So while we had missed out, we hadn't missed much.
This reminds me of my own 10-year high school reunion. I was one of the main organizers of the event, having been on student council when I was in high school. This was done in the days before social media. It took a lot of effort to track down most of the approximately 300 graduates of Yorkton Regional High School's class of 1993. I probably spent four months doing that off and on. E-mail sure helped, but there was no such thing as Classmates.com or Facebook. I had to use a Yahoo group as a form of mailing list. Remember those? Most people don't.
All told, only about 60 people showed up. It was interesting, but definitely not Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion. I was especially disappointed that a lot of the people who were still in Yorkton chose not to attend. Maybe they didn't see the point.
Next year the 20-year reunion is coming up. Our class president of 1993 asked me a while back if I wanted to work on organizing it. No thanks, I replied. After all, I don't live or work in Yorkton, while he has actually assumed his father's old job as the student counsellor/spirit guy with the Regional.
With Facebook these days, getting the word out should be a snap. Just set up a Facebook page, and start inviting former classmates. It should go viral enough to reach nearly everyone (at least those with a Facebook account, which is nearly everyone) in a few days. Easy peasy.
But then again, one of the initial allures of joining Facebook in the first place was reconnecting with old friends. Surely by now most of the people that you have any desire to keep in touch with from the old days are already on your friend list. Long ago Facebook ran out of new "friends" to suggest to me, both literal and Facebook-style. If they're not on your list by now, you probably didn't care a hoot about them in the first place.
Indeed, one of my Facebook friends, a friend of a friend, just posted a photo of her 20-year reunion. There were 34 people in the picture for a school of similar size to mine.
The question is, do I want to go through the effort of organizing, or attending, a reunion when such a small fraction of people are likely to attend in the first place?
I guess we'll see when the time comes next year. Maybe I'll set up a Facebook page.
Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected]
