There was a significant high school reunion four years ago that I did not attend. It was never likely that I would. I share with Mark Twain the view that “all the me in me” is from the little town where I began, but it has changed so much it is no longer there. And for me, unlike some people, high school did not constitute the best years of my life. No “Glory Days” nostalgia for that four years

Earlier this year, the same milestone high school reunion rolled around for my wife. And she didn’t just attend but helped plan the shindig. This wasn’t difficult because we live in the town where she attended school. She was not alone. A surprising number of her classmates still live nearby and showed up. She looked forward to it, had a good time, and all the attendees seemed to get along swimmingly.

This surprised me, and we chatted about it afterwards. Part of our divergent attitudes can be attributed to personality or temperament. She is an extrovert. Me, not so much. But the more I considered the case, the more it appeared that demographics is destiny. Her school was not large, was located in an area more rural than suburban, a few miles outside a middling-size city and had a fairly homogenous population socio-economically. It seems to have been surprisingly free of cliques.

My school was considerably larger, was home to a small college town, was ten miles from manufacturing plants and twenty-five miles from a large city. In the halls were the children of college professors, blue collar workers, families with a long pedigree in the town, not necessarily well-off but sure of their place in the world. Some kids had parents who were the superintendent of schools, in city government, owned the local bus company, were doctors and lawyers or commuted into the big city to work as insurance or oil company executives.

The student body reflected the world from which it was drawn by hiving off into smart kids, jocks, monied kids, thugs, nerds, working class kids heading for the Chevy plant, others aimed at college. These circles rarely overlapped. Thus, my wife’s school resembled Mayberry or Hoosiers and mine The Breakfast Club on a good day, Carrie on a bad.

This difference probably helps explain our divergent experiences in and attitudes toward high school. The more I looked into it, the less surprising it became. In preparing for the reunion, her school gathered data on her class, and I did enough research, with the help of a guy from my school who keeps a tally, to compare the two.

My class numbered 405 members, hers 198. A surprisingly large percentage of her classmates attended the reunion, almost 70 percent. Considerably less of my cohort did so four years ago. Aside from the heterogeneity of my school and homogeneity of hers there was another obvious reason.

Thirty-five percent of her class members still live within 40 miles of the school, and another 35 percent live in the same state. No doubt that helps account for the fact that the reunion organizers were able to discover the whereabouts of virtually every member of the class. By contrast, the whereabouts of 25 percent of my classmates is unknown. And of the 300 hundred whose location is known, only 35 percent still live in the state where we attended school.

This points to another reason I chose not to attend my reunion. In my larger class, there were people I didn’t know at all, some I disliked, some who disliked me, and a few good friends. But only two of those live anywhere near our Ohio hometown. The others are scattered to the winds – living now in Colorado, Georgia, Oregon, South Carolina, New Jersey, Missouri, Florida. I was pretty sure few to none of them would attend. They have moved on both literally and figuratively.

There was also the demographic elephant in the room to consider. Turns out sixteen percent of my classmates are dead and thirteen percent of my wife’s. This doesn’t mean she grew up in a healthier place, but that her class is four years younger than mine.

Due to genealogical research into her family and mine, I also know a bit about our people. Mine reached Ohio in the 19th century from New England, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, and North Carolina and Quebec where many of them first arrived in the 17th and 18th centuries from the England, Scotland, Germany, and France.

The people that led to me stayed put when they reached Ohio, but many of their brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts remained a generation or two and then headed farther west to Michigan, Wisconsin, Kansas, Iowa, and even Washington and Oregon in the years before 1900.

My wife’s folks were largely English and Scots-Irish with a dash of Germans, who also arrived over two hundred years ago in Virginia and North Carolina and remained in the region. This picture of a more diverse, mobile population in my Ohio and more rooted, less apt to move on community in North Carolina is arguably characteristic of the larger North and South and is due to deep historic, economic, and demographic factors – slavery not least among them.

I don’t know that this adds up to much or proves anything, but it is a reminder that who one’s people are, where they came from, and what kind of society they inhabited may say more than we usually acknowledge about where and how we choose to live, what we eat, and what we believe, how we think and behave. Even, perhaps, when it comes to something as trivial as out attitudes to high school reunions.