When high school classmates roll into town and post an alert that they will be someplace, I try to make it there. Sometimes the scheduling is impossible, but other times it works out great.
A classmate who currently lives in Las Vegas is in the area for a wedding this weekend. He posted on social media on Friday that this morning, he and one of his cousins would be at a coffee shop in the town we all grew up in. Luckily for me, the coffee shop location isn’t far from the dance rehearsal location I needed to be at later in the morning.
After the kickstart of a granola bar and coffee at home to be able to function like a human (and so I can tolerate myself), I hit the road. It was more coffee with long ago friends for the win. I love morning coffee. It is difficult for me to function without it. The more if it I drink, the more I talk (ask my colleagues).
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| This hangs in my kitchen. I didn't take any coffee shop photos. |
Five of us – my classmate and his wife, his cousin who was a year ahead of us in school, and another schoolmate from the year ahead of us – chatted and reminisced and caught up in a booth in the coffee shop. In my mind, time has frozen as far as my high school classmates and I are concerned, and our faces are perpetually preserved at 17, 18, and 19 years old. Wrinkles and gray hair be damned.
In our more mature times, the former football player and mortgage banker is now a talented and prolific painter and frequent traveler. The cousin, once upon a time a paratrooper, is the officiant at the wedding they were in town for this weekend. These are things I wouldn’t have predicted when we were 18, but they are fascinating aspects of the people they’ve become. Of course, at 18, I also wouldn’t have guessed I’d have done roller derby or be a belly dancer performing at small, local festivals. Life is full of fun surprises.
Meeting up with friends from long ago is great. Note that I am being careful to not say “old” friends because I hate that foul word. As much as I love colorful language and especially the glorious, all-purpose F-Word sentence enhancer that slips out of my mouth on a shockingly frequent basis, “old” is possibly the worst word I can think of.
When you lived in the same city and know all the neighborhoods, went to the same schools, had the same classmates, and have shared experiences, there is a built-in shorthand. We don’t need to provide backstory for teachers, classes, and big events.
Remembering some of the specifics to the teachers, classes, and big events can get a bit fuzzy, however. There were amusing moments this morning when trying to recall some people and places. There was the search for the name of a kid from our class of 330-plus students – “you know, the blond kid.” Then there was the forgotten name of a neighborhood club which led to us running through the names of half the bars and hangouts that existed back in the day when the drinking age was 18 and so has half of our senior class. “You know, the one near where Marty’s Pizza was. What’s the name of the street? A short street. No, not Mill Street, that’s downtown. No, not British American Club, that’s in West Fitchburg across from The Log Cabin.” We finally circled back to the name two people had said much earlier – South Fitchburg Social Club. I can’t even remember why we needed to know the name of the place, but it was fun getting to it.
Dang, being the old people in a coffee shop is different than being young and overhearing the old people and their convoluted conversations. Hearing the elders talking in circles and trying to fill in details used to be a combination of comedic, boring, and terrifying. Now that being a participant in that type of conversation is a frequent event, it’s closer to pure terror, mostly because it won’t get any better. Oy.
In terms of time, the hour at the coffee shop was a small portion of a great day, but the value of that hour was far greater than just 60 minutes. Long live long-standing connections. And coffee.
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