“The Reunion.” Is there possibly a person reading this article or glancing at the headline who has not been to a reunion? Who does not know what a reunion is? I am pretty sure there must be a few, possibly those heroic individuals who have not given into such common events, individuals who . . . but already the absurdity of this beginning for such an article.
I was at my 62-year reunion luncheon on Thursday, Aug. 15, 2024. The reunion was at the Bellport Country Club for the class of 1962 at Patchogue-Medford High School. Over the years there had been reunions semi-sponsored by the high school, but then something happened and there were no reunions and . . .
But the idea of the reunion, the getting together by a group to celebrate an experience. Graduating from a high school is such an experience. Though now I am aware there are graduation ceremonies for kids who have finished nursery school, have finished elementary school, and probably even junior high school. I am sure there are histories, psychological studies, social commentaries on such experiences, including of course the gatherings of the veterans of the increasing number of recent small wars America has found itself in.
If you are from or were from Patchogue you have always known that Bellport is different: richer, better looking, fashionable (John Lennon and Yoko Ono once upon a time came looking to buy a house there). It is a summer destination for well-to-do city people — but for the children of the city people, as one told my daughter, who had gone to the same well-known private school in Manhattan, the real name of Bellport is “Boreport.”
Bellport is an old, traditionally beautiful village complete with its own ferry to its own beach on Fire Island, but also with a very defined section for people who are not white and living not fully on the other side of the tracks — let us say that section straddles the tracks.
But the reunion: a group of people I have known since the early 1960s and now of course reflections of my own shape, size, etc. A buffet meal and more standing and sitting around, and then the moment. That small packet of pages picked up as I arrived — an attendance list and then two pages that when I glanced at them changed the feeling aspect of being at the reunion: In Memory — 58 names. Returned Envelopes — 28 names.
There were also two letters from classmates, one from a woman living in Florida, which might stand for the others who are in Florida, or, as is said, “Patchogue South.” The second letter was from one of the most successful of my fellow graduates, but to describe the contents of the letter would be an invasion of privacy, mainly my own self-censored reservations, as to even begin to describe the contents of the letter would . . .
So what remains: a few photographs that my wife took, and these pages — the ordinary apprehension of the nearing mortality, and the nothing to be done about it, but some names could be mentioned, one in particular: A former Suffolk County police officer who once upon a time as a well-connected distributor of controlled substances made the main pages of The New York Post, The Daily News, and even The New York Times, but a miracle of something or other seems to have happened. He lived out his life in Patchogue with no further public mentions — as one said, “It just went away.”
Or I should mention — but won’t as he told me not to — the name of the first person to welcome me to the high school when I went there in 10th grade. Or should I mention the guy who was the editor of the high school newspaper who published my first two stories and who later did as a Marine two tours in Vietnam and came back to become a priest, generating those clippings from the city papers about his problem, summed up in a description of his own bishop’s response in a meeting up in Vermont: “Hey __, where’s there smoke there’s fire, and you are fired,” a wonderful turn of words passed about, and then he was no longer a priest.
And of course there is the Jeff MacDonald story, the Green Beret doctor still in prison, but he was a year older than all of us attending the reunion: Our school’s one real claim to fame, the wonderful small-town story.
But in that packet of pages, two lists: In Memory (58 names of the dead) and Returned Envelopes (28 names).
While everyone attending was celebrating his or her own life and nothing wrong with that, the title of one Spanish book, “Tragic Sense of Life” by Miguel de Unamuno, should be quoted, and he is a writer who had probably never been heard of in Patchogue, though when I went out into the world I fell into this book and these sentences as to the why of this article: “Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory and by memory, and our spiritual life is simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future.”
I first read those lines in the year after I graduated in 1962, and they remain with me as a way to end these lines as I hold those two pages of names.
But while there is not yet a postscript, one does wonder if there will be another reunion. Is that how all reunions end? Either for the one writing this piece or those who read it and wonder. Lastly, Bob Monaco was the classmate who had the idea for this reunion, so this can be a long note of thanks to him.
Thomas McGonigle’s novel “Going to Patchogue” is out in a new paperback edition from Tough Poets Press.