Same friends. Same booth. Entirely different agenda.
by Joe Broadmeadow
Friendship does not change much over a lifetime. The conversation does.
Seventeen
Four of you sit in a car in a parking lot, going nowhere, for three hours.
Nobody has money. Nobody has a plan. Everybody has an opinion, delivered with the absolute certainty of someone who has never been wrong because they have never done anything.
“You can’t get a ticket if you keep up with traffic.”
“Is that a law?”
“It’s basically a law.”
Somebody’s cousin knows a guy. Nobody ever locates the guy, but the cousin’s reputation survives intact for another decade.
They debate the plan for two hours and end up where they always end up: the same pizza place, the same booth, three dollars split four ways. Time costs nothing at seventeen. You spend it like a lottery winner.
Thirty-four
The reunion took six weeks of scheduling, a shared calendar, and two reschedules for a stomach bug of unclear origin.
Now the conversation runs as a status report. Job, house, and kids, in that order, and the third one comes with photographs.
Somewhere around the appetizers, two of them discover they used the same roofer. This becomes the high point of the evening. Genuine excitement. Phone numbers exchanged. A grown man says, “He did the whole thing in a day and a half,” in the voice he once used to describe a concert.
Someone checks their phone at 9:15. The sitter charges extra after eleven, and the math has been running quietly since eight.
Everyone says, “we should do this more often.” Everyone means it. The next one happens in fourteen months.
Fifty-six
Dinner opens, as tradition requires, with the organ recital.
The knee. The shoulder. The one who had a scope of something and intends to describe it whether or not anybody has ordered yet, including the sound effects caused by the prep. Somebody quotes his cardiologist like scripture.
Then tuition. Someone says the number out loud, and it lands on the table like a dropped plate. Nobody flinches, because everybody is carrying the same number.
Somebody does the retirement math in public. “I could go at sixty-two, but the health insurance.” No one in the history of the American middle class has ever finished that sentence.
One of them has taken up a new hobby with the intensity of a convert. Pickleball. Sourdough. A smoker the size of a Buick. He will explain the bark. You will listen to him explain the bark.
Somebody got a dog. The house got too quiet. He will not put it that way, but that is what happened.
Seventy-three
They pick the restaurant for acoustics. This is not a preference. It is a requirement, researched in advance, with alternates.
Reservation at 4:45, and nobody apologizes for it. Somewhere in the last decade, the early dinner stopped being surrender and became strategy. You beat the crowd, you beat the noise, and you get home in time for the TV show you will sleep through in the recliner.
The conversation opens with the obituaries, which now function as a social calendar. “Did you see?” Everyone saw.
Then the stories. The same four, told for the four hundredth time, improving slightly every year. The car has gotten faster. The fish has gotten heavier. The cop who let them go has gotten kinder. Nobody corrects anybody. There is a treaty.
Someone adjusts a hearing aid mid-sentence. The sentence continues.
We had a conversation the other day that started about the passing of relatives, took a sharp turn into assisted suicide, the how and when, and then morphed into some other bizarre topics.
And none of us had more than two drinks.
(Here is a public service announcement: never search any site online for assisted suicide. I’m surprised they didn’t notify emergency services. I’m still getting alerts about the Samaritans hotline. I was just researching a blog piece, not planning anything.)
And here is the part no seventeen-year-old would ever believe. This is the best version of the conversation. No status reports. No updates. They already know everything worth knowing about each other, which frees up the whole evening for nonsense.
At seventeen, you talk about what you are going to do.
At thirty-four, what you are doing (which bears no resemblance to your plans)
At fifty-six, what it cost.
At seventy-three, what you did, and who is still around to hear it.
The last one takes the longest to reach and runs the shortest. Order the dessert.
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