One of the Things We Lost Raising Boys.

18 February 2020

Saturday night, Francie and I went out to dinner with a couple, people we consider good friends, for pizza at a locally famed pizza joint.  Subjectively I think we all had fun.  I know for sure I had fun. Conversation touched on all sorts of things, from politics to plans for the future. The evening was nice, really nice.

Outside a core group of friends this is the was one of the first times we have been out for an evening meal with “adults” in forever.  We used to dine out with other couples a fair amount in the past.  Back when we lived in Delaware with used to go out with several different couples where one or the other member of the couple worked with me at AIG. Those meals were always fun.  

You have to understand that back in those days AIG had a great many employees who had been at one time “attachés” at US embassies in some very difficult countries.  One guy had stories from just about every hotspot in the 1960s to the 1980s.  He was always very vague as to what his job in the diplomatic service was.  His job at AIG was equally hard to define and vague. Still, it was clear he had the ears of people in power. We were pretty convinced that that AIG hired a great number of former CIA operatives.

I digress, we would go out with these work friends for Japanese noodles, Thai specialties and the occasional fine dining, say at the Brandywine Room of the Hotel Dupont.  Buckley’s Tavern was also a favorite. 

When we left the Delaware Valley and came back to Michigan, we had a core dining and socializing group of about 8 people.  This aggregate was comprised of people who were our friends before we left Lansing in search of opportunity in the far too busy and far too aggravating east. That group eventually winnowed down to 6 or 7 depending on the occasion.  

For us it was a Friday night tradition to hit a Michigan State hockey game and then go to Beggar’s Banquet for food and beers.  Liver pate, London broil, chocolate torte and dark beers were the food, and anything and everything were the subjects of conversation. 

We would also grill out at each other’s homes.  Got a vague memory of drinking home brew, eating ribs and ending up floating naked on a raft in the pool on one of these occasions with a number of people watching.  I emphasize I was not alone floating au naturel.  Counting me there were a physician, a computer engineer, and a lawyer floating there with barbeque sauce on their fingers as their only bodily covering.

Then came our boys, Spore I and Spore II, Satan and Beelzebub, Primus and Secundus.  I had different names for them depending on the circumstance. For the first few years we still got together with our core group, but then came hockey, debate, orchestra, choir and every other wonderful time suck you can experience while watching two you men travel from their diapers to their twenties.  And if our time was not sucked up in one of these activities there were the trips home to the beach, to Toronto, to Chicago, to Kentucky, to DC that siphoned off any spare time.  Cultural enrichment was a key goal for our duo.

Of all of things that could have done it, hockey was the one that killed our going out with other couples.  On any given weekend we were travelling three hours round trip through ice and snow to rinks all over Michigan. The best you could come up as a meal with other adults normally involved sitting in a fern bar with twenty young men (and one young woman) gnarring at pizza and drinking pop, and the parents scattered at tables surrounding the feast. 

Don’t get me wrong, some of my favorite memories are of tournament socializing. There we were somewhere in Ohio, eating buckets of fried chicken from a local grocery store’s deli counter in a hotel’s conference room, while drinking beer with other moms and dads.  But the time commitment, two nights a week for practice and two nights a week for games and the real-life requirements of work that bled into the evenings killed just getting together with anyone for socializing.  Factoring in my decision to run, and get elected to the 20+ hours unpaid position of school board member, there just was no time for other things.

On January 10^th, a great block of time opened up for us.  We walked away from the burdens of our jobs. Concurrently the boys have become socially self-sufficient, if not economically so (yet). Saturday nights for them means Dungeons and Dragons and Wednesday are for bar trivia. They have people now, they don’t need us to manufacture fun.

Now is our moment to re-emerge. My plan here is to get together with people whenever we can. I want to re-engage with the quiet pleasures of sharing a meal and talking about things that are not ritual. Ritual may be the wrong word, and so is routine.  Left to our own devices we establish patterns regarding what we talk about and how we talk about it. When you go out to eat, you hear from people who live differently, who experience life differently.  Now is the time to get “other” people back into our lives.

Hopefully all that was lost shall be regained.