What I Learned From a Reunion of Old Friends
Crow’s Feet Prompt # 20: Friendships
Five boomers zoomered to plan a 50-year college reunion event.
We graduated in 1971 from St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa.
The Old Friends Reunion planning group built a list of friends, picked a weekend date, developed an itinerary, and emailed invitations.
Our planning group is pictured above. As my mate Barrie muttered before a snap, “that’s the first time Gardner has ever been in the back row.”
Big Barrie still knows me too well. He heard too many times the story about how I only made the Sacred Heart School choir because they needed a short guy to complete the front row.
Friends know our vulnerabilities; what trips our trigger.
That’s why my planning pals went back and forth on a reunion of one or two nights. We eventually chose two and then added a third, a Thursday night for the planners and partners.
Yikes. I thought one was risk enough.
All summer I worried that America’s hostile politics, propelled by differences over COVID, masks, and vaccinations, would intrude upon our gathering.
Many of my old friends are red. I’m not.
Jerry is the reddest.
This is our group on Friday night. Jerry, white shirt, and spouse Mary, striped dress, hosted us at their Davenport home. Later that night, Jerry said to me “you were uptight last night.”
“Yeah, I had all these fears about how our differences would come to the surface and wreck our reunion.” This little back and forth came in the middle of a quiet and intense conversation about how we were as far apart in politics as it is possible to be.
In high school, we competed fiercely in tennis, basketball, and, well, everything. I liked Johnny Rivers. Jerry hated him. During basketball games in his driveway, he tormented me with The Rolling Stones screaming from his open bedroom window.
Today, Rivers is on his workout playlist. And The Stones are the only 60’s group to make our local gym’s session lineup. Those few minutes are always my best.
On Saturday night, in the middle of a dinner conversation about religion with Jerry and Mary, my partner Rebecca said:
“You know, I hold all my religious beliefs loosely. I do that because there is so much we don’t know. We are so small and the world is so large.”
Jerry and I used to compete on the court. That competition was one of the things that bound us together. Now we fight on a different playground.
After raging at each other during games, we often went to a Dairy Queen to debrief over ice cream malts.
He loved strawberry. I didn’t.
Fifty years later Rebecca puts into words the secret sauce.
Thirty minutes after our sweaty battles, Jerry and I were slurping together.
Holding our differences lightly.
And friendship tightly.
