Aside from bloating myself with turkey and assorted turkey accessories over the Thanksgiving holiday, I also took in my 15-year high school reunion. I have to say, it was a little lackluster. I guess it was the 15th. Not as big as the 10th or the 20th. It’s that one in the middle that I suppose most people, if not within a decent distance, are going to sleep through.

As I’m a whopping four-minute walk from the Holiday Inn where it took place, I really didn’t have much excuse for not showing up. My best friend from high school was back in the area, as were most who came to the reunion, for Thanksgiving to visit family. As is in the script for what seems like 40 percent of Iowa college grads, he went to Colorado. Unlike many who continued to wander, he’s still there. We both got haircuts before the event. That’s about the only prep we did before heading out. I don’t know what we expected going to the event that would leave us disappointed. Certainly we were happy to see the friends who made it back.

But the turnout (about 70) was a far cry from the reported 230 at the ten-year. There were no major surprises to be announced. A couple more were married. A lot more had kids or at least more kids than the first time. But nobody was famous yet, at least not that showed up. No guys brought their boyfriends or vice-versa and we found out at the ten-year who was going bald already or who, as they say in Grosse Point Blank, “had swelled.” It was really kind of a status-quo revelation. A few had just recently moved back home, having once vowed to their parents never to do so. In their defense, the Dubuque of today is not the Dubuque of just 15 years ago. More opportunities and amenities now enhance that natural beauty, safety and comfort of this place that we could not appreciate as restless 18-year-olds. No one was the “hit” of the party. While I was happy to see people, there were no amazing transformations for people to gossip about. We were a generation quickly becoming defined from the one that followed us. Our DJ at the event was from an even further-removed generation and didn’t seem to have a clear understanding of what was popular in 1991. It was becoming a topic of conversation. But eventually he pulled out the generation-spanning classics by AC/DC and moms in black dresses cut-loose on the dance floor with the girls that they raised hell with once upon a time.

The biggest change from just five years ago? People were tired, ready to call it a night before midnight. There were a few there who look like they can still whoop it up. But there were far more moms and dads in the room who have intimate knowledge of Saturday night prime time television. Sometime during the night of scanning for familiar faces that you want to encounter, my friend found himself at the bar accepting free shots from generous classmates. I did not see this happen.

But I did see his glazed over look at around 11:30 and realized that he had gotten far ahead of me on the inebriation scale. By then we had pretty much made the rounds of our closer friends and been cornered more than once by that person who keeps talking about stuff you don’t really care about but because you listened the first time, you’ve become a safe place to come back to again and again.

We unceremoniously made our way out, exchanging a few phone numbers and addresses. Note here that my generation does not text message. Just one of many signs that there is a distinct generation gap forming between us and the graduates of today. We considered stopping at Paul’s Big Game Tap on the way home but my friend was fading fast. We’d have to wait for a nice breakfast. It turned out he was in no shape for that either.

I missed a lot of faces I really did want to see. I think all the people who became doctors must have been on call. They weren’t there. And there were a lot of them. Hopefully people will feel nostalgic when 20 years rolls around. So we have five years to lose the 50 pounds we gained in the last 15 and make our fortune. Or maybe those aspirations are a little too high. Perhaps we should just hope that our knees don’t ache too bad when we go to bed and the furnace doesn’t go on the fritz. Or better yet, let’s just try to still be kicking at all. There’s a lot of living to do in five years.