HIGH SCHOOL REUNION HELPED ME APPRECIATE LIFE

I had a very emotional experience recently, and I don’t mean the U.S. election.

I attended the 50th anniversary reunion of my Outremont High School class, in what proved to be a remarkable piece of time travel.

Many Montreal schools have reunions — some like Wagar famously hold them in Toronto. So it was good to see over half our Outremont grads were still in Montreal (only seven of 60 in Toronto).

Others were eagerly flying in from Alberta, B.C., California and elsewhere after a lifetime away.

Months before the reunion date, emails started to fly — at first polite, then more emotional, filled with classmates’ personal histories that often surprised me.

I knew we were all Protestant School Board grads whose class lists showed no Protestants. But the emails revealed almost a fifth of our classmates had been Hungarians — who’d fled to Canada with their families in the late 50s, after the Soviets invaded.

Many described harrowing escapes “hiding in bomb shelters during battles” or “crawling across frozen fields at night, as Russian flares lit up the black earth.”

But they all somehow found ships to Canada.

Amazingly, some never knew how many other Outremonters were also Hungarian refugees — they were too busy trying to learn two new languages and fit in as Canadians.

But as they discovered each other in recent months emails flew back and forth in Hungarian, exchanging stories — though I can’t say about what, as I couldn’t read letters starting “Baráti köszönttel, all!”

Other classmates were children of Holocaust survivors who also shared refugee tales with each other for the first time. All these new immigrants were poor, hard-working, determined kids — which is why Outremont dominated the province for years in top matriculation scores.

Meanwhile, another Grade 9 classmate opened up about how he had “hidden emotionally at high school even from myself … feeling like a perpetual outsider.” This only changed years later, he wrote, when he met his “soulmate” and discovered he was gay.

Of course, back then none of us knew even that word — he was just a sweet guy with a gentle way.

Amid the sea of nostalgia we had an in-house critic, a former classmate and friend who fired off dismissive missives — suggesting we all snap out of this “orgy of self-indulgent, self-congratulatory narcissism.”

He remembered school as a “dark, chilling … miserable prison” for churning out masses of conformist students and corporate citizens, with teachers who were “gangsters and drill sergeants.”

“The military meets organized crime.”

His letters gradually revealed bits of his life: he’d run into health problems, battled the medical then legal systems unsuccessfully — and felt they had “swindled” his life away.

“No lawyer = No justice = No democracy,” he wrote repeatedly, from wherever he lives.

By the time our reunion finally arrived, earlier this month, I knew a hundred times more about my schoolmates than I had when I sat beside them.

When we gathered at a small downtown hotel I often had to peer closely into aging faces, or at high school photo badges before memories shot back. But in minutes, many people seemed shockingly familiar and even intimate, like family you haven’t seen in decades.

Our school had been divided into classes by gender, so we instinctively sat largely at separate boy/girl tables the first night. I heard tales of success in China and failure in Alberta, of bankruptcies, marriages, families, illness and death.

Often refugee or immigrant kids had become everything from physicists, diplomats, psychologists, professors, publishers, architects, lawyers and judges to filmmakers, writers, naturopaths and spiritualists.

One successful “shmatolgist” had subsidized the flights of some who needed help. There were memories of teachers gone by — from our sexy Latin instructor to the “gangster” French teacher who terrorized me, too.

There was great warmth toward Montreal and some visitors took a walking tour of our old school neighbourhood — visiting historic childhood landmarks, like Pendeli’s pizza.

At a closing brunch, boys and girls in their 60s finally broke school rules and mixed tables. There was a pathetic, failed attempt to sing the school anthem — though we all could all have flawlessly sung “Jesus Loves Me.” Or recited the Lord’s Prayer.

There were many promises to reconnect — and a general feeling we’d been part of an unusual school with a strange lasting camaraderie.

Some grads in Montreal have already started meeting for a regular lunch, while Outremont lunch chapters are forming in Toronto, Ottawa, B.C. and beyond.

Meanwhile emails continue to fly across the continent, commiserating with American grads over the elections, or mourning Leonard Cohen, or exchanging more Hungarian lore.

I feel I’ve gone back in time to re-examine my past, like in the classic Jimmy Stewart Christmas movie: It’s A Wonderful Life.

As in that film, there are things you appreciate more in adulthood, including it seems, high school.