Reunions

 

They start with family reunions. These are occasional gatherings so parents can converse with their children and mingle with their grandchildren. It could be an annual event like a holiday or a vacation. It is a time to meet your parents’ siblings as aunts and uncles and their offspring as cousins. As families move apart, these reunions are the only time to see the evolution of your ancestral family tree until these reunions become funerals.

School mates have reunions. It is usually connected with the graduation class anniversary. Some may have connections with friendships kept up through the years and others are just strangers with nametags. Yearbook photos show how much we’ve aged. The cliques that separated and declared our status in high school, still reform to the remembrance. Like most reunions, there is eating and drinking, but no children. There may be a current partner, but no one wants to meet an old x from high school.  The letter sweaters don’t fit and the words to the fight songs have faded. Through the years, fewer class reunions attendees show up due to illness, wars, distance or interest.

The other day there was a reunion with old work mates. Someone tried to contact people who worked at the same company and have a gathering for conversation and lunch. These are people you would not recognize passing on the street. These are people who worked in different departments and long since stopped working there and may only want to have a meal with these associates to gossip.

Using social media, text, phone, messenger and probably AI, a half dozen showed up to a nice sports bar with lots and lots of TV screens in Short Pump (a place I’d never attended but looked very Richmond). As each one appeared I had to figure out who they were when I knew them. After a few remembrances faces started connecting the dots. Some of these people I’d had no contact in decades, so there was a lot of catching up. There were no updating resumes, but names of memorable characters and the stories that made them that way. There was not enough time to delve into personal lives and adventures since we left employment. There was a list of those who have gone on to permanent retirement.

Any of these reunions, as time marches on, are cherished moments of fuzzy memories of survivors.

They are all flashbacks.