Colleges and Universities have periodic reunions; they are supposedly held to let old friends see each other again, to let alums show their continuing loyalty to the school and to promote their athletic prowess—usually the value of their football team.

What the reunions are REALLY for, is to allow the College Development department to hit alums up for money, even when they already have $multi-billion-dollar endowment funds.

The five-year reunion of my class was being held the first weekend of October, on and close to campus. There would be a big get-together dinner and dance on Friday night, followed on Saturday by the first home game of the football season, and ending on Sunday morning with meetings of various groups who support the college. Pretty standard stuff.

I was arriving earlier so that I could join up with a group of us apart from the rest of the class. It was an eclectic group of people, majors from Fine Arts to the big E.E.—Electrical Engineering—or in my case, History. What we had in common was that we had all shared the same floor in our co-ed dorm, and it turned out most of us were very simpatico and had spent a lot of time doing things together as a group. We managed to request the same group of people as dorm-mates for our years at school and had developed some great and lasting friendships. A few of the ‘couples’ who had gotten together at school were now married and even starting on kids and family.

Several of the women who had been on the floor organized a pre-reunion, reunion, limited to the friends we had become.

I had finished my degree and gone on to get my MBA from one of the top ten MBA programs and had been working since then with a well-known hedge-fund. Long hours, lots of money, and not much time for socializing, so I looked forward to taking a break for what was, in essence, a long weekend off.

The first thing I did, after arriving, was to stop and get my ‘badge’. Although most of us would know each other, there were wives, girlfriends, husband and boyfriends who didn’t know us. After five years, it probably didn’t hurt to remind us of each other’s names as well. Men who are basically bald five years after you last saw them can be surprisingly hard to recognize.

I put my name tag on my sports jacket pocket, Doug Johnson, Bxxxx Hedge Funds, and entered our meeting room at the hotel.

As I walked into the room, I could see about 25 of my former dormies (out of about 30 of us total who had lived on the floor) and a lot of other people who I didn’t recognize, but I assumed were related one way or the other to the members of our group. Of course, there were also the service people, immediately offering me a flute of champagne and some hors d’hoeuvres to munch on.

I mingled. Ran into my old roommate, who was fine, still in good shape (he was a runner and swimmer) and profitably occupied in his old man’s company. “I’ll be taking it over any day now, so if you want a job...”. I assured him that I didn’t need a job, but thanks for the generous offer, and we chatted for a minute before I moved on. We would see each other again over the weekend.

A couple of the women who had been on our floor were standing together when I approached, so I got to hear about their lives, their husbands (who were in the room somewhere), their kids and some significant events in their post college lives. I had actually attended one of their weddings but was out of the country when the other had her nuptials. I did send a gift.

It was good talking to old friends, some of whom I had maintained contact with, but others who had fallen out of even the ‘Christmas Card’ every year sort of contact. We made sure that we had each other’s current info.

A couple of the guys there were alone because post-divorce, they were single again. Sad, really. Less than five years, married and divorced. Life.

The women, in general, seemed almost offended that I was 5 years out of school, still unmarried, and not even a girlfriend. I had to smile as I told them that I was perfectly content, at least for the moment, with my current status.

Eventually, I ran into one of the former ‘dates’ from back in our dorm days, Alice.

“Doug!” she shrieked, as she ran a couple steps and threw her arms open to hug me. I returned the hug, happily. We didn’t ‘make it’ as a couple, but we had a good time while it lasted and neither of us had hard feelings when it ended.

“Alice, I’m so happy to see you. And you are still so beautiful,” and she was. If anything, she had become more beautiful since college. Part of it was more money to spend on her hair and clothes, but part was just her filling out a little. I think that her ‘girls’ had grown from ‘C’s to ‘D’s.

“Aren’t you still the silver-tongued devil.”

With that, she introduced me to her husband, a tall man who had played on the football team, a little overweight now, named Clint. Clint had gone into insurance after graduating and admitted that he didn’t keep in shape the way he should.

“It’s the old ‘sitting at a desk all day’ syndrome,” he told me. “I try to get out on the golf course with clients,” he said with a grin, “But now-a-days we don’t even carry our bags, we stuff them in the back of a golf cart. We claim it’s exercise, but mostly it’s a chance to gossip at the 19th hole bar when we’re done.”

I knew of Clint during our college days, but I didn’t know him, per se, although he seemed like a friendly enough sort, not fixated on his past glories on the football field.

Alice then pulled another young woman into our little circle.

“Doug, I don’t remember if you ever knew my cousin, Sylvia. Sylvia was two years behind us.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Sylvia,” I said, and I meant it. She was a dark-haired beauty, with striking blue eyes, and a lithe, rather athletic looking body. Not overly large in the bust, but proportional, with a set of legs which approached perfection in my mind.

“Pleased to meet you, as well, Doug. Alice always had such nice things to say about you. I think she kept us apart when we were in school because she didn’t want any competition.” She and Alice both laughed at her little flirting.

“Plus, I heard about you from some of my professors. I was also a history major, so we both took a lot of the same classes. Most of them thought you would eventually get a Ph.D. and teach.”

“Not with all of that student debt!” I laughed. “Thank god I’ve made enough money to pay it off.”

We all chatted for a few more minutes, while Alice told me about her job (teaching junior high school) and how she and Clint were trying to get pregnant.

“We’ve been married and having the time to ourselves, traveling and having a good time, but we decided that we don’t want to wait any longer. Having babies doesn’t get easier as you get older, you know,” making a pointed remark at me.

“Hey, aren’t I supposed to get married first?”

“Well,” she replied, “It wasn’t as if you didn’t have plenty of choices you could have made.”

Alice and Clint then wandered off, leaving me and Sylvia together.

There seemed to be some chemistry between Sylvia and me, so we found some chairs and sat down to talk.

We reminisced about old professors and courses, times in the library doing research; little stories that would be meaningless to anyone who didn’t have a large overlap of shared experiences.

Sharing her area of interest with me: the transformation of ancient Greece from an oral to a written culture. The poets versus the philosophers—a written language would ruin the minds of the young, said the poets; they would never have to remember anything and would never exercise their memories. The concepts that seemed absent in oral traditions that developed once the written culture was established. Boring stuff to anyone not into history.

I told her of my emphasis on the period from the Civil War to the end of World War Two, the advances in the U.S. industrial base, the inventions, the development of a modern nation state. We went from just another developing country to the pre-eminent economic, military and political power the world had ever known.

Then we just talked about the normal things that people do who have just met. Where are you from? Family? Preferred music, books, lots of insignificant things, especially for two people who might never meet again,

“Just curious, why did your parents name you Sylvia? It’s kind of unusual these days. Shakespeare? ‘Who is Sylvia’?”

“You’ve heard of Sylvia Plath, the poet who committed suicide? My mom was a fan of her poems. But something even stranger is, your college paramour, Alice, was named after Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein’s ‘partner.’”

“Odd that. She never told me, but I never asked either. ‘Alice’ could have come from a lot of places. Relatives, friends, even from ‘Peter Pan’.” Honestly, I was a little leery of her story. It sounded a little too pat. Maybe I would ask Alice about it sometime.

Nevertheless, we were transfixed each other in about an hour.

The group was scheduled to go out to dinner at 7:00 PM, and then afterwards we would meet at a club for drinks and dancing. It was getting close to that time, when June, one of the dormies who had organized things came over.

“Doug, we couldn’t get agreement on where everyone wanted to eat, so you have your choice: some of us are going to Le Moulin, the French restaurant, or to BBQ Joes.” Then she gave me instructions to both.

My own inclination was to go with BBQ Joes, which had a sports bar sort of atmosphere, but Sylvia had other plans.

“Are you going to join us at dinner?” I asked.

“Oh gosh, I’ve been dying to try Le Moulin, but it’s pretty pricy. Plus, I’m not really invited. I more or less crashed your reunion, and I was never part of your crowd.”

Was there ever a more obvious invitation for a single man to ask.

“Would you care to come along with me? I would be happy if you were to join me at Le Moulin.”

“Really? How exciting! Crash a reunion and end up going on a date with a handsome, single man, to a restaurant I’ve wanted to try. Perfect.”

At that point, we gathered our things and Sylvia and I went out to my car, linked arm-in-arm. I thought that this reunion was turning out better than I had imagined.

We arrived at the restaurant and joined the others in the anteroom while the staff set up a table for twelve. There was enough room that if anyone else arrived we could fit a couple more in. In about ten minutes we were seated.

That was when things started going south.

After we were seated, Sylvia suddenly stood up and excused herself.

“Oh, I see an old friend. Let me go say hello to him. I’ll be right back.”

First, she wasn’t ‘right back’, but when she did return, her friend, who she introduced as ‘Brent’ came along. Without their asking anyone, Brent pulled up a chair on the other side of Sylvia, and they began talking, strictly to each other.

It took about 10 minutes before the waiter came for our drink orders. Brent and Sylvia ordered their drinks and didn’t notice when I just asked for water.

It was a further 15 minutes, or so, when the waiter returned for our dinner orders.

Sylvia and Brent were still engaged in a lively conversation, with Sylvia periodically touching Brent’s arm. They both put in a food order, and then ignoring me, returned to their conversation.

By that time, I’d had enough. Sylvia, my self-proclaimed ‘date’ had ignored me for around forty minutes, and I was not going to put up with it.

Without excusing myself, I got up and headed for the exit. I grabbed the waiter and cancelled my dinner order and left. So far as I could tell, Brent and Sylvia never noticed, their heads still together as I left through the front door and retrieved my car. I decided to head over to BBQ Joes to have my dinner there.

I did text Joan, who was more or less in charge of the group at Le Moulin, that the two people at the end of the table were strangers who were just trying to freeload at our dinner, and to make sure that they picked up their own tab.

Everyone was already eating by the time I got there, but at BBQ Joes, it took almost no time for me to get a pitcher of beer (for myself and to share) and an order of pork ribs that were still as good as I remembered them from when I was in school. Brown beans cooked in a molasses sauce, coleslaw, and their garlic buttered rolls, fresh from the oven completed the meal.

I had a great time with the folks who had chosen BBQ over French Haute Cuisine.

Later that evening, as planned, the group reformed for drinks and dancing at The Highlighter club.

We were all pleasantly buzzed, and everyone who wanted to dance had plenty of opportunities as we made sure no one was left out. No wallflowers allowed in our group.

As the night was drawing to a close, I was back in the hotel lobby, when June approached me a little unsteadily, chuckling as she got close.

“Let me tell you, there were two unhappy campers at the end of the table when the waiter dropped off their check. They were suddenly looking around for you, amazed that you had taken off and left them with the bill. The gal, Sylvia, seemed particularly incensed about it. She seemed to believe that you had committed to paying for their dinners and drinks! What a laugh.”

I just shook my head.

“Entitled grifters. They just learned a lesson—we are not all suckers. We’ve seen it before.”

With that, June and I hugged briefly and each went our separate ways, she with her husband, and me back to my hotel room alone.

Honestly, I didn’t lose any sleep over my actions. If Sylvia had been even courteous enough to ‘be with me’ during dinner, continuing our conversation together, having a good time, I would have gladly paid for her dinner, no problem and no expectations, but her behavior was completely unacceptable.

The next day, Friday, was the first day of the ‘real’ class reunion, that included all of the members of our class, not just the ‘roomies’.

Check-in was in the lobby of my hotel, so after my morning ablutions, all I had to do was take the elevator down, and there was the table, manned (if you will) by a couple of undergrad volunteers (sorority sisters, if I had to guess.) Since a lot of people were driving in, the morning activities didn’t start until 9:30 AM, but they had a continental breakfast and drinks (coffee, tea and other non-alcoholic drinks) in the main room where we would be meeting.

I did run into a couple of old friends who hadn’t been in our dorm and was able to catch up with them. I got the feeling that about one-third of the class still lived in the local area, another third lived in a radius of between 50 and 100 miles from the campus, and the other third, like me, lived more like airplane trip distance.

My roommate caught up with me again and seemed to be seriously talking to me about a job with his dad’s (soon to be his) company. When I explained what I was making with the hedge fund, he backed off.

“We wouldn’t be able to meet your current income, much less offer you more,” he declared. “But when you get tired of the rat race in the city and want to live in God’s country again, we could talk.”

I didn’t entirely discount that it could happen; our industry was notorious for burning out young analysts after a while. But I was on a fast track towards a partnership, which was where the real money was.

There were a couple of women, married and now divorced, who I had known who indicated that they might be willing to renew old friendships. I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t know what had caused them to split with their husbands. I wasn’t interested in getting someone else’s failed spouse, thank you. It was also one of the problems with having your employment listed in the little attendance booklet that they gave everyone: some of the ladies might know what the implications of someone working for a hedge fund might pull in. I didn’t need Golddiggers either.

At 9:30 on the button, one of the college administrators kicked off the ‘official’ reunion.

The first thing was to go over the activities schedule for the weekend.

There was the football game on campus that we would all attend on Saturday although we didn’t really have a great team. In fact, they were rather mediocre. We rooted for them because they were OUR mediocre football team.

For Friday there were other options as well.

There was a golf tournament being organized. Not my thing, but a lot of people were golfers.

The second was a trip out to the shotgun range to shoot clay pigeons. That was more down my alley; plus, one of our classmates had been one of the finalists for the Olympic shooting team and was a well-known international competitor. He would be there to give us pointers on improving our skills. That, I signed up for.