This summer, I crashed a 50th high school reunion that wasn’t mine. It could have been but I changed school systems and the kids I grew up with and I went in different directions. I’m hard pressed to think when we ever crossed paths during our high school years while living in the same town.

I grew up in the Catholic system in Weirton, attending St. Paul’s Grade School, but after seeing and experiencing a few abuses, though they were few, I’d had enough of uniforms and nuns and went off to Weir High School; plus, I didn’t want my parents paying another extra cost for my high school education.

In comparison to today’s classes, we had a large graduating class of around 44 from St. Paul’s 1971. There was a handful of us who did not attend Madonna, with most going to Weir. Even the ones I’d been buddies with in grade school, I hardly remember even passing them in the hallways of the large public school. It was a different world just four months later and the contrast between the schools with Madonna and its close-knit group all under one roof and Weir with its campus-style seven buildings, vast and intimidating, couldn’t have been greater. The steel mill was still thriving and feeding the community, and so we were satisfied with all our eggs in one basket.

The first day of class at Weir there was a fog so thick one could hardly see 10 feet away. At the end of the day there was a race riot. Then for the last day of the first year, another riot and then it was over. In hindsight, the dichotomy between the schools and the symbolism becomes evident.

We are the generation of World War II parents and the traumas we experienced through assassinations and shocking news throughout the 1960s, ending with Kent State, where my cousin was an unharmed student on campus at the time, bonded us in a subconscious manner that exists today. No one at the reunion talked about it, but I felt it was there. The eyes don’t change, even when the physical parts do, I could see those kids I knew in their eyes during the gathering.

The bond is more than just childhood connections. We were that class to go from President Kennedy’s assassination to the Kent State slaughter. And though there are many of those classes across the country, this was ours. All that had happened in between — the Boston Strangler, the Texas Tower shooting, Richard Speck killing eight nurses, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy — were all earth-shattering news. We were still together when Charles Manson took more of our innocence and we began locking our doors. Today, when we hear of some equally shocking news, much of the rhetoric is, “Oh, another one.” The impact is not the same and several commented on “today’s” generation with perplexity and noted their penchant for taking risks without fear of consequences.

There are many who will never go to these things, these reunions. That’s OK, too. This was the first high school reunion I attended, and I felt happiness in being there, but I also felt sadness at times for the connection lost when we drifted away from each other. I cry for the friend who lost her son; then there was the star athlete as humble as he never was and another who was just a shell of himself, battered from work to put food on the table.

There also was a reading of the names of people who lost their lives and who didn’t make it this far. I saw their pictures in the yearbook and it was tough to comprehend. There was never enough time to have the one-on-one, catching-up talk with the ones I wanted to share time with. People moved from one group and conversation to another because there were so many bases to touch.

We bonded through childhood with a background in disaster shrouded in a tumultuous era we didn’t understand, but it was a bond to share a love through time that I could see even if they didn’t outwardly acknowledge it.

I tricked myself into thinking it was a St. Paul’s reunion I would be attending, but it was a gathering of several Catholic schools that came together under one roof with many others I never knew. But it would have been good to know them, too. I suppose this was just a self-indulgent excursion into the past. It would be fascinating to see the physical traces of our paths we all took and compare how close our footsteps came from one another over the years. That would be impossible to see, but it was fun to think about.

Time also plays tricks on the imprint of childhood faces and I found myself not knowing what to say at times, or fearful of asking the wrong questions.

There were only 10 of us from that 1971 St. Paul’s class who attended, but the bond I felt with those people was as strong as any high school bond others feel. After wondering for so many years where they all had gone, I drove away into the night away from the building while they were all still in there and thinking of the Seals & Crofts song “We May Never Pass This Way Again.” I do love these people and I found it hard to walk away when I said goodbye, because we were saying goodbye for a second time.

And here I was walking away from a part of my childhood and emotionally, it hit me harder than I had bargained for.

From Kennedy to Kent State, that’s what the reunion meant to me.

(Long is a resident of Cadiz)