20 Years After
Late December 1983. Almost 20 years anyway.
There were 4 of us. Paul Ted, Danny, and I. 3 of us were out for Christmas break from college. Danny worked full time in my hometown. I had left for school the fall of the previous year, and we tried to recover in as much lost time together as we could during the breaks. Even much of summer had been lost as we all worked to pay bills, or save money for the coming school year.
But this was Winter break. No work, or less of it. Gifts, food, hanging around. More food. More hanging around. A monotony of relaxation. We took that time and filled it with nothing very exciting, and were very happy to do so.
By that night we had already spent a lot of time together. Board games in the late morning and afternoon (the history of Renaissance Italy remade in a most peculiar fashion), dinner at the Tasty-Freeze with much filching from each other's food, and a movie I don't remember. Maybe the third Star Wars flick.
We were ending the night parked near another restaurant. Ted had moored us in his T-top Monte Carlo next to Long John Silvers, an island of battered fish products in a oceanic parking lot, with Safeway and other stores behind us in the distance. We had spilled out of the car, surrounding it. I remember Danny was in his new bright skiing jacket and I was warm in my black navy pea coat. We were leaning against the front of the car, talking off and on about women. Ted was standing in his boots on his car seat, upright through the driver side T-roof in his green military jacket and occasionally bumming smokes from Paul, who was shuffling next to the car staying warm. Relying too heavily on layers, he had not worn a heavy enough coat, again.
We had come here to watch "young" high school students and various expatriates drive by, dragging Main. Dragging Main, you see, was the basic social event one had to do when coming home, or at least once on a weekend if one still lived in town. It used to mean drag racing down Main street, but we in our time were made of less hardy stuff than our parents, and simply drove while trying to look cool, with only infrequent loud bursts of speed.
The route, and routine, was:
To begin with, have more than one person in the car. If you were by yourself, you were usually a guy, and involved in the inevitable forlorn hope of hooking up. Start the drive at the Sonic drive in. Drive around once, seeing and being seen, but not stopping, only telling friends you'll hang later. Turn left out of the Sonic, down Main. Pass the Junior high, the supermarkets clustered at Main and 12th, and then under the underpass where 8 railroad tracks and sterile dirt formed a roof. The center two blocks of town had been paved over in the early 70's to make a walking mall, which was Not The Right Thing To Do, as my grandmother frequently told me (and who was proved correct years later), and you are forced to make a small detour. Turn right, then quickly left. Continue for two blocks, past the movie theater to see who is there, and another left at the library, and another at the furniture store. Slow, past the police and fire stations, then left, and a quick right and more speed to renew the circuit.
From our vantage point, we could see the entire panorama of the drag that night. Equally important was being seen. We shifted between horseplay, armchair generalship, insults, looking cool, bad jokes, and filling each other in about our last few months apart. People would drive up briefly. The guys would come in fast and stop short, joking and asking after folks who might be out that night. A few familar girls and their friends pulling up slower next to Ted or Danny to say hi, with Paul and I hoping for an introduction, or at least a clear view.
Eventually, the visitors stopped, and it got a little colder, and a litle darker. We stayed and kept talking til the street cleared with only a few semis driving through town and the infrequent slow moving cop, literally coming from the donut shop up the street. Cap'n Jellyrolls, we called them. After one too many long silences, we figured as a group it was time to head, and made brief loose plans for the next day. Ted drove us back to our cars at the theater, and we drove different directions to our homes..
We did get together for a while the next day, re-discovering the New World as English, French, Dutch and Spanish imperialists. Always good on a cold morning. We parted for separate dinners, and that was quietly, unobservedly that.
We haven't been together since, we four. Paul and Ted went to the state school, and Ted got married late in spring. I went back to school, came back for summer and met a girl who I liked and surprisingly liked me back, changing my temporal priorities, as Ted had in a more formal way. Danny was thrown from his car later in fall and hit his head on a curb, becoming lost to us.
You often don't know when it will be the last time, or the last good time. We didn't, even though looking back I see it was a time of life where many friends grow apart. But it was good, that last time. There's a Greek legend, from Hesiod perhaps, of a priestess of Artemis whose sons carry her on their back to get her to the festival in time for the sacrifice. As she asks the goddess for the greatest of gifts for her sons, they slide to the ground, dead. Artemis takes them at the height of their power, of their piety, of their life, sparing them failure and old age and pain. Maybe we got a Greek gift. We never had a chance to get seriously angry at each other, or be pulled apart by carelessness, or disinterest, or slow grievance. It almost feels better that it ended there, rather than lurching around looking for something lost. Nothing was lost.
Ted and Paul and I still get together as three, in person or online, but the dynamic is skewed by time and the missing fourth. We're different, in life, interests, and priorities. But we still connect, easily, simply, with our strategies and insults and filling in. Across the country or even sometimes across the globe, they are still in many ways the brothers of my youth. All for one, and one for all, when we get the chance.
1 January 2003