The Boy in the Band

Thanks to Facebook, I am now in touch with many folks from my hometown that I last saw when we were just kids.  I left North Miami Beach for college and quickly became a New Englander, returning only rarely in the intervening years.  Although my high school class has formal reunions every five years and informal ones periodically, living this far away means that I rarely connect with old friends.  Even rarer is the opportunity to see people who were school friends but happened to be from other graduating classes; they attend different reunions, if at all.

One of these is my friend, Seth, with whom I have been reunited, corresponding now and again through the magic of Facebook.  Thank goodness we found each other, because he and I have so much in common.  By that, I mean I am incredibly jealous of him for having, in my opinion, the best job in America.  He is CFO of the San Diego Symphony—need I say more?  On our recent trip to San Diego, my husband and I were fortunate to be able to join him and his lovely wife for an al fresco dinner in Little Italy.  It was wonderful to discuss the good old days, recollect a legendary trip with the marching band, and to compare notes on our collection of grown children.  The longer we reminisced over spicy pasta dishes, the more ancient neurons sparked, bringing forward in our brains long-lost memories of youthful escapades.

Seth was a year older than me, but we became acquainted in our early teens through a common interest:  my beautiful friend, Cindy.  One night, Cindy was sleeping over my house while we were babysitting my much younger brother.  Cindy saw this as an opportunity to stage a rendezvous with that rascal, Seth.  She let it be known to him that my parents would be out, informing me that he would be heading over.  This left me with a dilemma.  How could we get a precocious youngster to bed at 9pm when it was only 6 and the sun was still shining? 

I knew that my baby brother could never be allowed to lay eyes on Seth, as he would certainly betray our mischief to the parents.  We came up with one of the worst ideas, the kind of thing that seems brilliant in youth but utterly ridiculous in adult hindsight.  In our family’s kitchen was a large wall clock hung high above the window near the ceiling.  Climbing up on the kitchen counter, I turned the clock forward to 9pm and then tried to convince the rambunctious kid that it was his bedtime.  He was not easily convinced, jumping in and out of bed every 5 minutes.  It was hard to be tough on him for his behavior given that we were the ones misbehaving.  Seth arrived, sneaking into my backyard to be admitted through the back sliding doors.  I ended up running interference between two hectic vignettes at different ends of the house:  the wide awake kid who needed special handling, and the two horny teenagers who, of course, kept two feet on the floor and their hands in their pockets.

I had not thought of that evening in forty years.  That’s the fun of reconnecting with friends from your childhood.  Youthful indiscretions are ties that bind.  Conjuring these stories is like taking a trip in a time machine.  I was instantly transported back to the days of my teenage angst, when I was  trapped between what I wanted to do and the fear of getting caught doing it.

How nice that this story has a happy ending.  Seth found his soul mate in Karen; their chemistry is palpable even after decades of marriage.   But there is more.  Because we took the time to renew our friendship we have brought it from our past into our present, enlarging it to encompass our spouses, and endowing it with the promise of days to come.