Kevin S. Giles with high school classmates (and longtime friends) Eric and Don at the July 2019 all-class reunion in Deer Lodge, Montana.

By Kevin S. Giles

Long before social media became a convenient tool for organizing reunions (or displacing them), people traveled great distances to enjoy face-to-face gatherings with friends and relatives.

Today reunions endure. We have reunions to celebrate music, religion, employment, ethnic heritage, history, neighborhoods, cities and military service.

Most familiarly, people attend family reunions, and class reunions, to reaffirm what they know best about themselves. This summer, I participated in both kinds.

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We’ll see more attendees next time

My hometown’s first all-class reunion, in Deer Lodge, Montana, drew a few hundred alumni. In my estimation, the modest turnout had more to do with the reunion being a new idea than from lack of interest. Plenty of our peers sat on the sidelines, watching how this first one would go, while the attendees jumped into whirls of conversations. The next all-class reunion, which organizers envision will happen in three or four years, should attract more people.

The novel ‘Summer of the Black Chevy’ by Kevin S. Giles grew from memories of his hometown. The novel also takes place there, in Deer Lodge, Montana.

Those of us who attended this summer found out soon enough that age doesn’t inhibit curiosity. Meaning, we all attended the same high school, so talk about it.

An older man (older than me) who drove into the cow pasture outside the pavilion helped me set the tone for the weekend.

“What year you graduate, sonny?” he asked me after we parked our cars.

“I’m from the Class of ’70,” I told him.

“Wet behind the ears, are you?”

“Why? Your year?” I asked.

“Class of ’50,” he said, extending his hand.

I spent the weekend meeting people I never knew, finding several I did, and discovering that those name tags hanging around our necks made for a great community treasure hunt.

You never know who’s on the other side of those tags until you ask.

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Class reunion, then family reunion

Two family reunions that followed the all-class reunion brought relatives from afar, as we hoped, but this year they were especially meaningful. At both events, one held in Montana and one in Minnesota, we embraced our granddaughter who has endured two difficult years of treatment for leukemia. She’s in remission from this terrible cancer, looks stronger as the months go on, and maintains a ready smile. Her courage inspires us all.

Both of the family reunions took place on lakes. Water brings peace.

Reunions remain widely popular and significant because social media can’t replicate a hug, a laugh, a sudden wondrous memory shared face to face. For sure, technology’s long reach keeps people in touch. At a true reunion, technology has little purpose except for recording photographs and videos. What matters to people most is to share common ground, in person, relying on spontaneity of conversation.

Aside from our personal reunion experiences, evidence of humanity’s collective quest for interaction can be found in all of literature. Reunions of any sort make good literary themes. Think long-lost love, estrangements, siblings separated at birth who later find each other, plots about reuniting in heaven, and the miracles of rediscovering deep emotional connections. Reunion themes take the form of love and rejection, triumph and tragedy, good and evil.

Reunions in literature

Jay Gatsby’s quest to reunite with Daisy Buchanan was the plot of The Great Gatsby, one of the best-known American novels. Author J.K. Rowling built tension into her Harry Potter books with simple devices such as keeping Harry out of touch with his friends through circumstances beyond his control. In the instance of mainstream popular fiction, romance novels thrive on themes of separation and reunion.

Reunions aren’t for everybody. Some people don’t like crowds. Some prefer to mingle only with people they know well. For others, reunions can recall painful memories.

To me, reunions help us appreciate how we age and evolve, bringing perspective to our common purposes. Seeing each other again can be joyful, partings can be sad, but reunions remind us that it’s a dull life to never try at all.

The original portion of Powell County High School as it looks today. It remains in use although enrollment has dropped to about a third.

Western Montana native Kevin S. Giles wrote the popular prison nonfiction work Jerry’s Riot, the coming-of-age novel Summer of the Black Chevy, and a biography of Montana congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, One Woman Against War, which is an expanded version of his earlier work, “Flight of the Dove.” His new novel, Headline: FIRE! is the third in the Red Maguire series. Masks, Mayhem and Murder is the second. The first is “Mystery of the Purple Roses.” More information is available at https://kevinsgiles.com.