november tour

We went from southern California to Seattle, up the coast, starting in Los Angeles. (After having watched the documentary “Los Angeles Plays Itself” I’ve been sensitized to the offensive abbreviation “L.A.”; no one calls New Brunswick “N.B.” or Santa Rosa “S.R.,” and our beloved city of angels doesn’t deserve the circumcision.) Of course the other way around would have been the sensible way. Beginning at El Cid on Sunset Avenue with a freshly assembled quartet, two of whom I’d never played with, was a brassy move, and it wasn’t any fault of ours but just the nature of habituation and practice that we played our shakiest show there. The last show, two weeks later, was really strong, and I wish that Chris Willman (Variety), Pete Thomas (Get Happy!!!), Sheldon Gomberg (Now Then), Kimon Kirk (Gaby Moreno, sideman), Sebastian Aymanns (Gaby Moreno, husband), and Lonny Ross (30 Rock) had been in Seattle to verify that, rather than L.A. (whoops), as they were. But seeing them at El Cid was a pleasure anyway, easily overriding the surly staff and the tiny piss-reeking dressing “room” where I held my nose and changed into my now-famed green suit.

Here were the players. Jenny, early 50s, a violinist steeped in folk traditions and jazz discipline and outlook, raised in the wild by wolves, approximately. Ethan, early 30s, a well-schooled session guitarist from central California, with a light touch and great harmonic grasp, and an attraction to jazz and bluegrass though not to certain wide swaths of youth music. Maxwell, late 20s and also central CA raised, schooled by Laurie Lewis and jazz-trained as well, at home on banjo and bass and guitar but I find it hard to believe that he plays anything as well as bass. All of them intellectually voracious, vocally strong, politically tuned-in, and Jewish.

It’s possible I put too fine a point on “Jewish” at a few shows, for instance, by introducing them by their lawyerly surnames: Scheinman, Sherman, and Schwartz. On stage in Seattle, I asked the three of them “What is the Yiddish word for that?” about an emotion experienced on waking from a disturbing dream. A nervous ripple ran through the audience. Do I imply that an all-Jewish band has a particular on-the-road, in-the-van feel to it? Maybe I do. Our convos were vigorous, thoughtful, and at times argumentative. We were politically tuned-in, though not always on the same bandwidth. Day by day the usual insanity splashed into our news feeds. The president had a friendly public meeting with a socialist, inviting the latter to call him a fascist; troops continued kidnapping people in Durham, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc.; Marjorie T. Greene suddenly resigned. Our quartet contained three lenses. Two were progressive-left, one center-left (hi, Mom!), and one was, in my judgment, pretty far out on the horseshoe, in Glenn Greenwald-land perhaps. I found myself wishing that a red-blooded right-winger or a capitalism-loving tech bro had been in the van just to widen the spectrum of opinion (although if any tech bros can play music well, I’ll eat my MacBook). Mostly, there was enough heterogeneity to give the van some pep without renting the social fabric.

The tour was good enough that the worst thing about it was that, except for once, we never got to leave a town at noon. As the late John-John of NRBQ said to a disobliging hotel maid, “Noontime is the universal checkout, Miss.” Musicians’ work hours away from home are normally noon to midnight, and twelve hours is already a fat stretch of time to be mentally alert, whether operating a motor vehicle or a musical instrument. One wants the hours on either end of that to be spent in cloistered thought with a hardcover book and a dainty glass of Crib Death or whatever cute name our bespoke rye-makers have lately dreamt up. In short, these departure times between 7 and 9:30 a.m. appalled me. But if rising with the cock crow and tolerating a diversity of opinion is all you have to complain about, you should be sleeping well enough that a little less of it doesn’t matter.  

Some musicians not named Robbie Fulks look at a tour schedule and think of all the people and places to visit. In my view, we are troubadours, not tourists. We’re not here to get to know you, Fort Bragg or Arcata, flitting down your dusty avenues at midday, tipping hat at locals, visiting shops and museums that have been generously thrown up to empty our wallets. It would be a better Robbie who gladly roused himself at dawn to go museum-hopping in strange towns, but a fictional Robbie. Non-fictional Robbie rises at dawn only to leave. And then under protest. It’s actually amazing how little you can accomplish between 8 and noon. I am doing a long-term study on this phenomenon.

In Folsom I improvised a stage bit which seemed funny in the moment but turned out tragic. A generous barfly had put a $20 bill on the stage near me during soundcheck because, I guess, he liked our sound. Later, during the show, when Jenny played a hot solo, I picked up the bill and ostentatiously “paid” her for it. Then Ethan started into a solo of his own, after which I reached into my wallet and gave him a $1 bill. The solo-payola followed by the insult were rewarded with one laugh then a bigger one, and I thought, “Hmm, jokes come in threes — and luckily, so do the solos in this song.” So, while Max was soloing, I rummaged around in my wallet and spotted the punchline: a $100 bill. Well, that got a nice little “aah” and chuckle out of them. I returned to my mic and resumed singing.

Do you see what is shortly ahead? After the show ended I was about 20 minutes working the merchandise table, as the others in an adjoining room changed clothes and, I like to think, talked about how funny and talented I was. I packed up my records and then walked in among them. When I politely asked everyone for my bills back, it transpired that Max hadn’t held onto his. Oh no: a hundred dollars. There had been some further bit of business with it, behind my back, with Jenny grabbing it and tossing it in the air. My stomach sank, as it had on the last episode of season 12 of CBS’s “The Amazing Race” when my son was determined a big loser. I looked all around the stage, but the bill was gone. I concluded that the sound man had spotted it and treated himself to a Michelin meal for one, and if so I hope he choked on it.

You know when you’ve got kids at home and they’re burdening and stressing you and you vent about it to someone, an acquaintance, who has time to chat but (relatedly) has no kids, but does have a dog, and says they understand exactly what it’s like because of the dog. I was like the person with the dog. I wanted to be respected for my suffering because I had stupidly lost $100, but because there was so much actual, non-self-created suffering near to hand, no one thought to touch me and console me in sugary tones. May I confess that I love both dogs and hundred-dollar bills? And that the seven on my one-to-ten scale of misery deserves your respect even though I’ve never experienced much misery? I’m mostly kidding, and I totally discourage you from Venmoing me a hundred dollars right now.

Ethan and Max assumed DJ powers while shotgunning on a couple drives, and from the back or the captain’s seat I gained some familiarity with the Brother Brothers, Ben Jaffe, and other young-ish acts outside my ken. The two players had an impressive appreciation of music across styles and times. I got a good earful of Lennie Tristano, and some folks I already dug like Duke Ellington, NRBQ, and Madison Cunningham. Ethan did a blind test on me, in which I correctly ID’d Paul Bley but failed to figure out Keith Jarrett. The younger guys valued prodigy playing, most of which was recorded and mixed with the highest level of skill on hand at the time, meaning we heard a lot of tunes that lacked room character, finger squeaks, slightly missed notes, and other such pre-digital artifacts. As the elder in the vehicle, and after an hour of this friction-free ear gauze, I begged for some Stanley Brothers, and Ethan kindly complied with “Rank Strangers.” A tear rimmed my eye on hearing afresh the strangeness, immediacy, and emotion of the song. That said, there is nothing wrong with Madison Cunningham, and if I live to 103 I’ll be excited to hear what she’s doing at 70.

The vehicle was a Jeep Wagoneer, and it was trouble. Leaving Alhambra, Jenny opened the back hatch to get something from her purse, closed the hatch, and then discovered that it was un-reopenable, whether by remote fob or outside handle or inside mechanisms. An online instructional suggested pulling a small metal mechanism from the recessed cabinet near the hatch, then taking a screwdriver and gently manipulating a tiny clitoral extrusion on the part. Had we been the famous Gentile scientists Masters and Johnson perhaps we’d have tried this, but no, it was clearly beyond us, beyond even Max, who was a master carpenter. We squeezed his bass amp through a side door and went off to return the car in Glendale in exchange for another.

That trip was long enough that Max was able to unspool three generations of his family history. It was wildly complicated, given that only ten or so people were involved. Story points included an escape from Cuba, illness and debility, a 95-year-old Queens grandmother who still worked as a CPA, a mom who as a young woman worked as a reviewer for the New York Review of Books, siblings all trained in different instruments by a bluegrass-nut dad who unlike many of that type was not an outright madman but had worked as both a labor lawyer and a journalist. It was like one of the lesser Jonathan Franzen books. Through it all there had been, to quote the Merle Travis song, “four or five divorces,” and by the time we got to Glendale there was still more to tell. The tales enlivened the trip. They spanned so many delicious but far-fetched specifics that it was hard to hold them in mind, and a few days later they were half-forgotten, and I begged for a repeat.

This is getting into the weeds, but our rep at Enterprise had never heard of liftgate trouble with Wagoneers, and he invited us to move ourselves and our gear into the other Wagoneer on the lot. We did, but found we couldn’t open the back of that one either. Another rep came out, and this fellow offered the magic detail: simply squeeze the back latch, pause, then squeeze it a second time. We hadn’t thought of doing that, because… it was fucking ridiculous. “Ridiculous” was the mot juste for the car’s software. For the rest of the trip, a warning on the panel behind the steering wheel flashed that the closed hatch was open, and an icon showed a car spinning zanily out of control. In Mill Valley, after I had closed the hatch manually, the alarm went off, and I managed to silence it after a minute of hitting buttons randomly on the remote. In Arcata it went off again, and no button-punching would quell it, I just had to wait until it wearily gave out. Meanwhile, an apparent effect of the hatch-open warning was that the interior lights shone without respite. One morning in Fort Bragg, Jenny bought some blue electrical tape to cover them, and that dimmed them appreciably but not totally. These were just a few of the problems with this terrible computerized mess of a car, in case you’re still reading.

Every now and then I get a sideman gig, which is a blast because I can focus on music, music that’s different than what I’d come up with, and let go of all the leader-specific stresses. But there’s a small downside of second-banana powerlessness. Some leaders hoard information, without really thinking. If there’s a single car key among the group, you, by which I mean I, might carry it around without consideration of others’ needs. What a great feeling. As keeper of the key, I enjoyed visiting the gym and freely going out for food or coffee while the others huddled in their squalid rooms. One night in Baker City, Oregon, around 10PM, after checking us all in at the Super 8 by the Chevron and the interstate ramp, I decided to flee that uninspiring setting, like a desperate Maxwell Schwartz family character, in order to head into town for a shot and a beer. The desk clerk, Miss Lexi, cheerily advised me to go to the Main Street tavern and ask for Hannah. But they were stacking up the chairs, down at Hannah’s place (don’t ask me how I remember these random names, while I can’t remember my cardiologist’s; I seem to form closer bonds with people who help me worsen my cardiological numbers) and so I went to a more darkly lit place off the main drag, parking the huge Jeep in the lot alongside a couple battered sedans. The moment I walked in, the reception brought back small-town heartland receptions from times past. The pool game paused, heads turned at the bar, time stopped.

Back in my brown-haired, pre-anonymous-cardiologist, fire-and-brimstone — in a word, halcyon — days, some blatant variable, something eye-catching in my personal train, would often keep tensions ramped up long past my entry into peckerwood taverns. I was with black women, or I was talking like a Northerner, or I was asking for a cocktail no one had heard of (in Walla Walla, that was a Martini), or I was just carrying a guitar. Once, memorably, at a hotel bar near the Madison airport, the guitars we had slung on our shoulders led to a tense showdown and almost to real violence. But more usually, what earns you steely once-overs in little towns is being young, male, and unrecognized, which is, I suppose, sensible. Recently enough, we were all apes, according to experts.

There in Baker City, I was two out of three, and lacking the third, I mean youth, was what made everything better. All tension dissipated after a second or two. Just one more instance where appearing old has proved a blessing. Being of no interest to anyone, invisible and sexless, always hits me in my happy place. So I sat in a corner with my iPhone and my little glass of whiskey, and the music blared and the pool balls clacked and the cigarette smoke drifted by. When I got back to my Super 8 chamber, Antony Beevor’s rendition of Paris’s liberation swam before me elusively  — ever-shifting coalitions of and conflicts between Petainists, Gaullists, Brits, Americans, philosophes, communists, and young bohemians, a slice of historical time best experienced with whiskey no doubt but better understood without it — but Dan Hicks’s “Shooting’ Straight” on David Sanborn’s “Night Music” greeted the soaked neurons very amicably indeed.

Ethan left us after five shows, to join the Wailin’ Jennys for some previously committed dates. I’d introduced him, night after night, as Michael Bublé’s guitarist. A cloying name-drop! But I meant only to bask in the highly unlikely, if not surreal, two-degrees-of-separation effect, Fulks + Bublé. The nature of celebrity is still not completely normalized in my cloddish midwestern head. Celebrity, a product minted and maintained in two central locations in the coastal US, works only because there’s a rest-of-the-country to imbibe its aura undistracted by the mechanics of its manufacture, to wolf down the starry sausage with gusto. Seven years into my residency and still not a thoroughly assimilated Angeleno, I flutter like a Baker City barmaid when I walk into Steve Martin’s house, or Drew Carey’s (another story). Even third-hand interactions, like Melissa Etheridge, from whose guitarist our quartet had borrowed an amp for our Folsom show, hit my skullplate with the sizzle of a publicist’s overitalicized one-sheet. Hey Wilmette, look at the people who I know know! 

We left central California in a grey drizzle, yapping about the Gaza ceasefire, Jeffrey Epstein, all the colorful outrages of the day. As though our devices had the same health differential as our bodies, the young in our group received breaking news hours ahead of the old. They followed American politics avidly, and they had what struck me as some extreme analyses. Propositions I found ludicrous flooded the air. 

Before recklessly proceeding any farther down the trail of Political Commentary, I’ll take the spotlight off the persons that logged the miles with me last month, to avoid betraying any confidences, and lump them in with a handful of other young progressives (hereafter YPs) in my midst. I’m directionally aligned with the YPs. I mean, most of us are directionally aligned on most things, if you zoom out far enough; we want to make more money, live more years, have better jobs and medicine and schools for our children, and not be blown up by fanatics. It’s the smaller differences that get us boiling. And given the notorious power of small differences to irritate, I’m bugged by YPs on a few points. Here’s three.

The first is an over-reliance on economic determinism as a magic key to unlock and explain all beliefs and behavior. “Follow the money,” say Karl Marx, Rush Limbaugh, and others. Applied on an individual level, in daily life, knowing how wealthy or poor people are — one ranting on the sidewalk, another theorizing arrogantly at a cocktail party — is strikingly salient in explaining why they behave as humbly or as boorishly as they do. Money is power, and great inequalities in power deform people and societies; the historian Richard White coined the useful term “the dangerous classes” in describing the social dysfunction generated in the Gilded Age by people with too much or too little. Scaling up to institutional behavior, the highly impactful decisionmaking of collectives like universities, businesses, law enforcement orgs, and militaries is often obviously (and often properly) undergirded by economic self-interest, at the expense of efficiency or altruism or long-range strategy. Demand transparency.

But the economic lens isn’t all-seeing, and attributing pecuniary motives to behavior is tricky, since people and institutions commonly act in discordance with, even in opposition to, their own financial interests. The economist Richard Thaler won his Nobel Prize by proving that psychological biases like loss aversion and “planner-doer” conflicts introduce serious imperfections into humans’ quests for profit and security. In the behavior of democratic voters, Thomas Frank famously asked,“What’s the matter with Kansas?” These voters seemed not to understand, or be able to calculate, what policies would clearly and directly benefit them. Irrational and even self-defeating preferences make it harder to assess the actions of others, who are motivated sometimes by cannily calculated self-interest, at other times by subconscious desire, and at other times by beliefs and values, which themselves may be more or less underwritten by objective reality.

Given all this, what’s your theory of mind for RFK? I find myself in conversations with various folks about what drives his anti-vaccine theology. My theory is that he’s a crackpot — he believes what he says. But from some YPs I hear that he’s in the pocket of a corporate overlord and very rationally enriching himself. Both could be true, but it does matter what he believes. (Though if you’re a South Carolinian with the measles, you might be beyond caring.)

Following the money is thus necessary but not sufficient. Religious fervor, ideological commitment, the needs of one’s progeny, chemical addiction — so many forces work against economic self-betterment, and with equal or greater strength. The possessor of the unlucky mind may drive himself into penury.

My second, and biggest, area of irritation with the YPs is the conspiracism that they share with the MAGA right. A beloved family member of mine has all the receipts on 9/11, which he assures me was an inside job masterminded by the Bushes; and here we go with numberless wacky claims backed by obscure quasi-evidence. Has some high-level politico been shot or shot at, and is there videotape of the event along with a post-investigation, evidence-supported, widely accepted story about what happened? Then there’s a livelier account on tap from the YPs, who have their own investigative sources, and present their flimsy theories with ironclad confidence. Charlie Kirk was killed, see, not by Tyler Robinson but the Mossad. A very online twenty-something told me so. Donald Trump’s would-be assassin in Butler was not Thomas Crooks but…oh dear, I’ve forgotten the story, and it was a good one. You’ll just have to “do your own research,” so you can steer clear of the lamestream herd and follow a much smaller herd right off the cliff.

It’s very amazing how the top-secret specifics of massive, murderous, high-level intrigues can continually sneak past sharp-eyed reporters from well-funded legacy media outlets only to fall into the grasp of Uber drivers, vegan bakery clerks, and musicians in struggling bands. As a longtime and unabashed fan of Jews, families, and the truth, I am perplexed and saddened to learn, from my YP friends, that the mysterious Jewish family that controls the New York Times has been scooped, time after time, by charismatic individuals working from home with nothing more than thousand-dollar microphones and great fiberoptic connections. I think this is actually a perversion of following the money. Lone loudmouths with less money than the Sulzbergers might have impure motives.

Finally, there’s anti-Americanism as a moral apriorism. I can go partway with you YPs on this, not to “America is wicked” but to “America is inferior on many measures.” Norway is more smartly governed. Ireland’s prettier. The Japanese have nicer gardens, the French make better movies, and Brazil and Ethiopia among other nations have groovier music. Also, let’s be honest, there are some little historical incidents that make the avowed ideals of the Declaration look a mite hypocritical. It would be fatuous to balance-sheet those acts of coordinated violence with a list of positives and lesser achievements, even though things like jazz, baseball, Obergefell, the Marshall Plan, PEPFAR, and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop do come straight to mind. The flavor and strength of our fundamental attitude toward our home country is, I’d suggest, a function not of pure reason but emotion and temperament. “In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope,” said one cool-blooded and thoughtful patriot; “God damn America!” said his pastor. Both are razzmatazz, but they do express with honest emotion, as far as we can tell, their speakers’ priors. My own temperament puts me with Obama. Before the net-negative migration of Trump 2.0, there was plenty of evidence for the American beacon-of-hope story in the direction of the traffic.

The anti-US reflexivity often contains an unfortunate but logical operational quirk. If you view MAGA as just one more scene in the ongoing corrupt, quasi-democratic horrorshow, arisen very naturally from the shooting script of our founding documents, then you can do little but smirk and shrug at the present regime. Whatever the president’s character flaws, at least he’s hastening  America’s deserved decline. State and DOJ under assault? Don’t let the door hit ya, running-dogs. The President’s personal goon squad is kidnapping people off the street? At least now the natives know what people in other countries whose rights we trample feel like.

This is a serious and even profound consequence of the goddam-it view: it licenses inaction. Along with whatever else MAGA loyalists and to-hell-with-America progressives can agree on, they both understand Trumpism as red, white, and blue all the way. Rock on, destroyer! Here’s a tune I can’t dance to. The wanton and arbitrary destruction of DOGE, the secret sex rings of financiers, the extrajudicial killings at sea, the disappearing of brown people to foreign gulags, the masked state agents terrorizing “blue” cities, the disinvestment in science, the crippling and corrupting of domestic law enforcement — all of this sickens me not only because it’s immoral, but also because it’s un-American. None of these policies advance American interests, but rather harm them, and most of them violate American traditions as well. I’m sorry but the America of unaccountable rampaging ICE agents and a DOJ primarily bent on persecuting the personal enemies of POTUS is not the America of FDR, or JFK, or Richard Nixon. The ideals expressed in our Declaration have meaning, and so do the limits on state power enumerated in our Constitution. Capital D, capital C.

But how I natter on. Back to the things I really know about. Music and time-killing.

I hit the hay in Eugene after the long day’s drive, thinking, as I so often do when the next day is largely empty — how will I ever fill the morrow? It always fills itself effortlessly, like the thinnest sand in a wide-waisted hourglass. Yet seeing it through night vision, prospectively, all the empty time somehow looks alarming. Waking up Tuesday morning, I struggled to remember the plot of Monday night’s “Golden Girls,” which made it seem as though the waste of time lay more behind me than ahead. After doing some laundry, taking a walk into town, catching up on email, warming up my hands on the Collings, and talking to my wife, there wasn’t all that much time left before duty kicked in, which was driving to a little radio station and then to soundcheck. Eugene is the site of some odd 25-year-old memories that I won’t bother unpacking here, but the main one was 9/11, which happened to fall when I was in Eugene. I recall the gay tomfoolery the night of 9/10 as vividly as the hushed locals in the diner the next morning.

With Ethan gone, I revamped the set a little, taking out a couple songs and adding others. I knew of course that the audiences wouldn’t perceive the new thing as a minus-one experience, but I feared I might. As the week went on I actually started thinking the trio was in some ways superior to the quartet, which sounds harsh on Ethan but really has everything to do with a quartet with two guitars in it and nothing to do with him. One guitar, one fiddle, and one standup bass: three instruments entirely apart in tone and frequency range and function; a blend of frets and no frets; a template of rhythmic foundation with a piece floating overhead, that piece doing most of the solo work. This closes in on communist utopia, the from-all in balance with the to-each. I don’t know, I’m overthinking it now.

At the Eugene bookstore where we tried out our new threesome, Jenny and Max and I changed clothes in a dusty, curtained alcove, keeping our eyes chastely off of one another. The metal chairs in curved rows were full of asses, and I put laminated QR codes under several so that people could send comments to my iPhone during the show. “Did you use to do theater, or maybe a stint as a lounge singer?” one message said. A lady named Jennifer was more novelistic. She wrote, “Thank you for taking me back into the sweet sorrow that shaped me even in its probable dysfunction. I miss the chaos sometimes, for everything seemed possible somehow, and when it didn’t I just went to the sand and the cliffs.” Wow! I admit a bias toward the funny comments, but the heartfelt ones like Jennifer’s are invaluable and rather sacred, in their way. They give me the feeling that my line of work is explicitly therapeutic. Some songs, others’ for sure and maybe mine, poke at sections of buried brain-stuff. “Thank you for taking me,” a stranger’s note begins, and already you think, Holy cow, I need to be aware of my potential power and responsibility (even as I pat myself roundly on the back).

The before-noon departure theme hit its ugly climax the last day, when we left Portland at 7:45, after having done a late show the night before. It was unclear to me why our Seattle show was set up as a matinee. Or it was clear but I didn’t want to dwell on it: my agent, whose surname is actually “Fang,” told me in a cryptic voice, while whirling his cape and holding me fast with his dark gaze, “You have traveled far, my friend. You will be seeing more matinees as the years advance, as they will, mercilessly and perhaps imperceptibly. Embrace the matinee.”

It was more the 11AM soundcheck I declined to embrace. Am I some goddamned children’s act? Around 8:30 we stopped for coffee. Since Max was loosely opposed to Starbucks, on principle, we agreed to stop at a broken-down shack off the interstate with handmade drawings on the walls. Jenny dozed on the Wagoneer bench while Max and I went inside. As usual, he had an instant easy rapport with the young gal behind the counter, and I exuded the hauteur of age while tipping her extravagantly and irritably thinking, “Go faster.” Only twenty minutes later we were back on the 5. The spongy hubcap with a creamy corona that I had uncharacteristically ordered from the pastry shelf had chemically altered in the shop’s microwave and gotten all watery and strange. As I I bit into it, hot goo squirted off the top and arrowed right into the lap of my one remaining pair of clean trousers. I leave the reader to imagine how I profaned the air, describing my quandary to my bandmates who were in no mood for pornographic metaphors.

After playing the show (tremendous fun, thanks Seattle people) I found myself, as evening fell, and after having said goodbye to the others, whizzing north along 5 once more, from the airport back to town, alone. I wasn’t lonely but, to put it oxymoronically, a weightlessness had fallen upon me. For two years I’d focused hard on my album, writing the songs, setting up the sessions and personnel, recording and mixing, readying the campaign with Compass, and then traveling the span of the country for three months pushing the thing. Of course I had help from others and couldn’t have done without it, and I had enjoyed all of it. Even though it wasn’t like curing malaria or teaching kindergarteners, it was a modest self-created mission and had injected some meaning into those two years. Now that it was over, I felt as though I’d dropped one of my kids off at college and was driving away. It surprised me how unprepared I was for the sudden absence of pressing duty. I guess I hadn’t imagined what it might be like, right after the last show of the season, letting off the throttle.

The reason I was returning to the city was that my old friend Steven had invited me to his house for dinner. We’d been close in the 1980s and then fallen off. There’d be “other people” there, he mentioned in a text. That had me driving a little slower. Other people really isn’t my jam. If you’re my friend I want to sit with you at a bar and catch up, not go to a wingding at your place with 20 strangers milling around. But there was no way I could pull out at this point. Steven’s wife would be putting some ad hoc meatless thing made especially for me on the stovetop.

I parked and approached the address on foot. Through the gloaming I spied a stranger, there on the sidewalk, also headed toward Steven’s place. But it wasn’t a stranger, it was Ron, whom I had last seen in the early summer of 1980, in geometry class with Jack Bookman. (The Quakers don’t use honorifics so Jack was just Jack, and I hope still is.) Ron had apparently passed geometry, then high school, gotten a couple advanced degrees and a wife, and grown old. I was a little stunned — evidently the non-miracle of animal aging is endlessly captivating to me — and in that state I entered Steven’s mansion, where I beheld two more formerly young 1980s Carolina Friends School specimens, Gretchen and Madlen.

Sodium pentothal time. I left Friends at 17 in a punchy, never-look-back mood. I hadn’t given these people, or the 76 other students in the building (it was a small high school), much thought since heading north to try to become a different person, one who was more polished and urbane and didn’t sit in cornfields trying to play the fiddle. When a one-page summary of my life’s highlights is composed after I die, Gretchen and Madlen and Ron won’t appear in it, nor will I in theirs.

Given all that, I was overcome by how overcome I was to see these old-timers. We had parted with our lives oceanically yawning before us. Now we were approaching the other coast, and for the interval that we were together in Steven’s living room, we were tight as shipmates. Despite having passed from the Greek statuary phase of our previous days into the Barnaby Jones chapter, we looked swell to one another, and talked nonstop through the meal. A picture of rough commonality emerged. Things had worked out well for us. We’d beaten the odds. We had all gone to elite colleges, paired off into solid marriages, pursued our chosen careers, and squirreled enough money away to avoid relocating to the sidewalk at seventy. Though sad news hovered close by (Ron’s brother was sick, Gretchen’s CFS boyfriend had died young), we ourselves were pink with health. The most overweight one was me. I’m not wildly overweight, either.

Most days I do stoic exercises, imagining all I might lose and then reflecting on my current happiness and how lucky I am and have been. But sitting at the long dinner table eating meatless chili with my old classmates, my luckiness hit me harder. Everything hits harder when others are around. I found myself swelling with a strong love for them, individually. I started to think we knew one another a little more accurately than almost anyone else we’d met since 1980, even though we weren’t that close back then and barely knew one another now…so it had to be an illusion and maybe a silly one at that. Still, a sweet illusion! “How precious each scrap of the world appears, in our first years’ experience of it,” declared John Updike. Heaven, he surmised, was conceived the wrong way round — it happened at life’s start. Well, the people who join your show when you’re 30 or 40 are much valued for never having seen you in pupa; as far as they know, you were born propertied and competent. Why people who had fallen together as uglier younger selves should especially take pleasure in each other is hard to say. I know that North Carolina in the 1970s was not heaven. As Gretchen said, the sheriff’s cars had “TWAK” — Trade With A Klansman — painted on them. 

It was almost too on-the-nose that this dinner should bookend a long period of driving around, singing about being old, and interrogating faded memories. Embarrassingly, I couldn’t resist the vacuum of sentiment sucking me in. I stayed for four-and-a-half hours, and would have happily stayed four more. One by one they all left, except for Steven and his wife, who finally had to kick me out.