When I agreed to help organize our 50th Xavier high school reunion, I thought I was saying yes to dates, emails, and logistics.
What I was really saying yes to was memory.
Almost immediately, the work stopped being about a weekend and became about people. About reconnecting with classmates I hadn’t spoken to in decades. About hearing familiar voices that somehow sounded exactly the same and completely different all at once. About learning who stayed nearby, who moved far away, who built families, who lost them, who quietly carried more than any of us ever knew back when we were boys in jackets and ties.
As I reached out, again and again the conversation circled back to the same place: gratitude. Not the sentimental kind, but the grown-up kind that comes with age. Gratitude for parents who worked overtime, skipped vacations, kept cars longer than they should have, and made choices we didn’t fully understand at fourteen. Fathers who were waiters, cops, firemen, small business owners. Mothers who stretched households in ways we only recognize now. Sending a son to Xavier High School was not a casual decision. It was an act of faith.
Organizing this reunion has felt, at times, like gathering pieces of an unfinished story. Each phone call adds another paragraph. Each email fills in a blank space. Some names are easy to find. Others are harder. And some names now live only in memory, which has brought its own quiet weight to the work. Fifty years is long enough for absence to become part of the room.
What I didn’t expect was how often the conversations drifted away from careers and accomplishments and landed instead on formation. On character. On being taken seriously too early. On the subway rides into the city and the sense that Xavier expected something of us before we were sure we could deliver it. We weren’t being prepared for comfort. We were being prepared for responsibility.
As this reunion has taken shape, it’s become clear to me that it can’t just be a party. It has to be a pause. A moment to stand still long enough to acknowledge where we came from, who helped us get there, and what we still owe—to each other, to our families, to the men we once were.
Organizing the 50th reunion has reminded me that the Class of 1976 wasn’t bound together by privilege, but by effort. By sacrifice. By parents who believed education and character mattered, even when it cost them something real. By Jesuits who saw in us things we could have not known.
This work has been less about planning an event and more about honoring a shared past—carefully, respectfully, and without noise. Fifty years later, it feels right that the reunion reflect not just who we are now, but how we got here.
And in its own quiet way, that may be the most Xavier thing of all.
The Valley Viewpoint 