old friends

Old friends, old friends
Sat on their park bench like bookends
A newspaper blown through the grass
Falls on the round toes
Of the high shoes of the old friends

—Simon and Garfunkel, Old Friends

*

      The just-concluded marathon road trip included visits with:

•       A friend we had first met in 1963;

•      A friend we had first met in 1965;

•       A friend we had first met in 1971;

•       Friends we had first met in 1982;

•       And our new friends, whom we had first met in 1991.

      These old friends are also, not surprisingly, all reasonably old now and part of the impetus of the trip, maybe an unspoken impetus, was the realization we didn’t know how many more times we’d be able to see these old friends. We’re at an age when continued contact is no longer a given, on either end. And we wanted to see these old friends before . . . well, you know.

      We hadn’t stayed in touch with all the old friends all the time since we had first met them. There were periods when we sort of lost track of one another, at least for a time. Distance, work, children, responsibilities, all of that. But with the miracle of all our recent technological advancements—email, FaceBook, texting—the contact has been easily reestablished, the relationships mostly regularly maintained.

      But those contacts and relationships via the internet or the occasional call or the infrequent lunch while on a short stopover are not the same as extended stays, not the same as having enough time for generalized shmoozing and in-depth reminiscing. This road trip there was enough time for our conversations to meander, forward and back, without checking our watches because we had to move on to the next appointment.

      We had enough hours this time to just be together. There were the preliminaries, of course, of talking about today—how the kids and grandkids and other old friends are doing, and the what-are-you-up-to questions: Alice is doing improv? Jonathan helped found a mutual aid society? And, of course, the how-is-your-health question?

      Blessedly, we all instinctively decided not to talk too much of current politics.

      But after the preliminaries were over, we were able to spend the most time talking about the old stuff, about what had brought us together in the first place, what had forged bonds that had lasted all these years.

      So, we reminisced with Sylvia and Doug about softball games in Aix-en-Provence. We recalled, with Andrea and Johnathan, when their daughter and our daughter were best buds as two-year-old pre-schoolers. We recollected, with Linda, that summer of ‘71—or was it ’72?—when we all rented a house in the mountains and rode our bikes around the gigantic living room.

      With Alice, and then Eric, we got out the now-crinkly old college newspapers and searched through mastheads and bylines and checked our old stories and wondered what had become of that wealthy if dim young woman and the smart, handsomely blond young man who had ultimately, one of us thought, gone into television.

      Each of us seemed to remember different parts of the past. Many of the old friends recalled, in wonderfully excruciating detail, what we had totally forgotten. Linda knew which pavement game we had played with a visitor (hit the penny) and took us to the restaurant we had all eaten in more than 50 years ago—it’s still there and still good!—and knew the precise location of our old water well shed. Alice brought out from the bowels of her house the letter she had saved from the famous playwright whose screenwriting course we had taken—and who had actually remembered us and sent regards.

      There was, throughout the trip, the sense of somehow meeting up with a part of ourselves from the dim past, but a part old friends still recognized. It was such a welcome reminder we still are, in at least some ways, the people we used to be.

Old friends, memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fears