My old friend Lee and I spent our first two years of college living on the legendary (if not, infamous) 3rd floor of the Middle section of Smith Hall at Bates College. We became close friends and that friendship kept going right through our graduation. A few years later, we were into careers, travel, families – and all of that adds up, right? We kept in touch, to be sure, but after the first few years somehow we didn’t manage to get together very often. I’d last seen Lee 15 years ago at our 35th college reunion.
About 6 years after that, shortly after Sue and I had taken up these travels and started this blog, I wrote about “… a certain ethereal plane of friendship where you can pick up a conversation as though you’d just left the room for a few minutes, even after a gap of several years.” I was writing then about Dana, who was my roommate at Bates for a couple of those years, who had joined Lee and me during our 2nd year on Smith-Middle-3rd fl., and that’s exactly what it was like to see Lee again – all the more remarkable for the considerably larger gap!
We fit a short visit with Lee and Nancy into the largest contiguous open space identified in our surprisingly full schedules – surprising given that we’re all 4 retired people with presumably not that much to do anymore… well, except travel, take care of family business, maybe some volunteer work, injuries and ailments, medical appointments and follow-ups, kids and grandkids (them, not us), vehicle maintenance, house repairs … hey, it adds up – still!
It was a cold and blustery day on the Cape. We arrived at Lee and Nancy’s mid-morning, went out for lunch (a great seafood place on the canal), took a walk out the boardwalk to the bay (got to do that, it’s Cape Cod!), grabbed the photo at the top (omg it’s freezing cold! and the wind! no long walks on the beach today!), and headed back to the house.
We got up to date on Lee and Nancy’s kids & grandkids. I found out Lee had spent a bit of time a few years ago playing guitars – he showed me a Strat he had built and let me try his beautiful Martin acoustic. The four of us shared details about our respective careers & retirement (deeper dives beyond the Xmas-card summary versions), hopes and fears about the future, things about our family histories, parents and siblings that we either never knew or had forgotten, and more. We talked until we couldn’t stay awake and picked up again in the morning – a cascade of conversations both enabled by and reinforcing the feeling of comfortable familiarity that is only possible between Old Friends.
Eventually it was time to move on. Encouraged by the ease of reconnection, and realizing that it wouldn’t be hard to arrange to get together again, hopefully it won’t be long before the next one.