“So we’ve stayed put since we saw you last. You haven’t. Bring us up to date.”
Our good friends from the 1970s wanted a synopsis of the 36 years since we last spent time together. We had worked at the same university, played golf, shared meals, started a penny-ante poker group (that is still playing), the kinds of activities friends do together. They had two kids. We had none so we had taken a special interest when theirs were a baby and toddler. Until this night, we had been just Christmas card friends for more than three decades.
The intervening years notwithstanding, they were still the same characters with the same sense of humor and the same capacity to tell stories over each other. Their voices were the voices we remembered. We felt comfortable in the familiarity of their home even though they had lived in a different house back then.
Bring us up to date. How does one convey the stories of 36 years in the minutes between pupus and dinner? They listed where we had lived over the years and approximated the length of our stay in each place. We were to fill in the essentials without losing the evening to mind-numbing narration of the virtual film called “Our Lives Since 1978.”
From our holiday exchanges, they knew what jobs we had worked. They asked how we liked each community in which we had lived. Embedded in our answers, no doubt, were cues about how we had felt about people, jobs and places, each cue a potential prompt for a divergent question and conversation. But dinner awaited.
Places and jobs. These were the skeleton of our effort to bring them up to date. Not surprising. How often do we define ourselves to others by what we do and where we live?
We ended our narration at the point of starting a school. They, being educators as well, wondered what that was like. To them it seemed daunting. To us it was what we did. She rang the dinner bell.
He said they had stayed put in retirement because they had already been in that city for more than thirty years, the time he had spent in the same job. I said having roots was desirable, that living many places risked no place being home.
He observed that home for us had been wherever Judy and I lived together. I agreed.
We talked about the old days, who was still at the university, who had died. We swapped stories about travel adventures. They go some place special every year. Have done since he retired in 2001. We discovered we had been in many of the same places. We compared experiences.
We heard about their kids and grandkids. The toddler we remembered is now 42, the infant is a state official, and they have kids of their own. Sleepovers at the grandparents are a regular treat. We told them about my mother’s romance at age 81, how she married a man she had not seen in seventy years. We learned things about her family not shared over dinners of yesteryear.
Occasionally, we divided into male-female conversations. He and I lamented the state of athletics at the old school–they should have stayed Division II–and complained about the high salaries of Division I football coaches. The ladies toured the house and spoke about—well, I don’t know because he and I were still lambasting the NCAA, referees who don’t call “steps” anymore, and wondering whatever happened to the well-behaved role model athlete. Old guy stuff.
I gave them a copy of my book. She gave us a bottle of the limoncello she makes at home. Delicious. I hope they find my book as good.
We talked at the dinner table until 11:30, over four hours. You can say more things in four hours than you can between pupus and dinner.
Had we managed to bring each other up to date?
Daniel E. White
March 15, 2015