Each time I head for my high school reunion I wonder ... what takes us there?

All around the country, there are people gathering in a variety of settings, traveling long distances, in order to be reminded of the past.

Never mind that often the past, or growing up, wasn't all that great. Still, the reunion beckons, typically in the late summer or early fall.

What draws us to them? And particularly, what draws us to them 40, 50 or 60 years later?

I am not sure I have an answer.

Is it healthy for mind and spirit? Do we want people to know we have been successful? Are we living in the past?

I am still pondering all this after recently attending my 60th reunion of the graduating class of 1947 from Uniontown Senior High School.

I wouldn't have missed it, and I was fortunate not to have to due to illness or being too far away. At least 56 are in the class picture. There were 90, including friends or family members of classmates, at the dinner.

I counted 25 classmates in the picture I have kept of my father's 60th reunion (the same high school, Class of 1917). I remember being at home as my father dressed to attend that reunion 30 years ago. We fussed about his bow tie being just right.

Now, here it is, my 60th. Impossible!

Reunions bring together men and women who more than likely haven't seen one another the past five years -- or maybe the past 20 years.

We don't really know everyone in our class and, in fact, often become aware of names only after subsequent reunions rather than the actual years we traveled the halls of our high school.

We stare at name tags, then faces and manage to put the two together more often than not. Still, there remain strangers among us, classmates we never really knew or just don't remember, especially after so many years.

Who is that? Some bring their yearbooks. It helps. It also startles.

We're literally strangers, due to the intervening years after age 17, even those whose names we know.

Not everyone makes each five-year gathering. It's rare to get to all of them. One classmate was at her first reunion since we graduated.

Another came to the 10th and the most recent was only his second. We go way back to seventh grade. He remembered I used to write the names of my boyfriends, in order of preference, on the back of my tablet. and his name was at No. 5.

I accused him of making that up. He said he wasn't, and he even named the other four boys. Those are the stories you start to tell and you are suddenly laughing and years melt away.

I've attended all 12 of my high school reunions. and there's more sorrow with each one.

Illnesses take their toll with age, and although reunions are meant to be lighthearted and a connection with our youth, as the years mount we don't laugh as much, we don't dance as much, we don't show off our grandchildren's baby pictures.

Those same babies are now possibly grandparents themselves, attending their own reunions. And so it goes.

The one thing we all have in common: We graduated together.

Our memories of our formative years are linked, even if fragile. In many instances, if not the best years of our lives, the years which shaped us for what was to come. To where we are today, if we've made it this far.

We were all once young together, learning from books and from life, and although we've changed, that will never change.

Maybe that's why we go back.