Reunions

About the Book

Reunions is a story about three people, two men and one woman, who graduate from the same high school in Florida in the 1950s. They go their separate ways, then are reunited for three events – two class reunions and a funeral.

The two men do well in life because they are highly educated and know where prosperity lies. The woman is not so fortunate – she ends up in a bad marriage and is forced to separate herself and her children from an angry spouse.

One man, the narrator, considers her a victim of society and tries to help her through life. The other man shuns her seeing her as a danger to society, an opportunist, and a traitor to family values.

The men clash at two class reunions, defending their ideologies and concepts about what is right in mainstream America and what is wrong. Their politics diverge significantly.

The third time the three meet is at the funeral of the son of one.

This is a reflection of life as we know it at the end of the Twentieth Century.

About the Author

Richard Braden spent a lot of time in the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force. He says he would have liked to try the U.S. Navy also, but he could never learn to swim. He is an aeronautical engineer and computer scientist, and has recently retired from a West Coast aerospace conglomerate.

He had the same little-boy fantasies as every other kid on the block when military aircraft would pass overhead. But he soon found that he would never be allowed to fly them-he could only design them and leave the driving to someone else. He became an expert bomb loader in the Air Force and later a teacher at the Air Force Academy.

He would probably classify himself as a pacifist today, because war has a way of making one extremely skeptical about man's commitment to peace and goodwill on this earth. Most of us preach a whole lot more goodwill than we practice.