Scarsdale Public Library

The reunion, sixty years on

Twenty three of us graduated in June of 1966, and by the fifty year mark we had scattered to four states and two countries, and the reunion happened the way reunions die, somebody meant to. Last fall I decided the sixty year would actually occur, and the machine turned out to be the committee that never sleeps. Finding people is the first battle, and it is mostly the free people search sites and library databases and the willingness to call a listed number and ask, which the machine organized into a tracker, who is found, who is a maybe, who has passed, with the sources noted. The letters went out in February, and the program wrote the first draft in the voice that worked, a little wistful, short, the date, the place, the reply by date, and it flagged every claim it was unsure of so I verified rather than trusting. The banquet hall contract got the full treatment, photographed and questioned, which saved us from a deposit clause that would have kept 300 dollars if we dropped below forty attendees, and we knew we would be thirty. Eighteen classmates and seven spouses came to the firehouse hall in September. Two had never been to any reunion, found after sixty years because a machine kept the list straight. We lost four since, and the memorial table was the machine's work too, the tributes gathered from everyone by email and arranged with care. The class of 1966 has one more in it, we decided that night, five years out. The machine is already holding the list.

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