Forty years ago, in September of 1981, my friends and I hopped on the Long Island railroad and went to see Simon & Garfunkel perform in Central Park.
It was a legendary evening immortalized in a hit live album and film. For us, it was an adventure; an experience… another chapter in a deep bank of memories.
Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were already sort of an oldies act when they took the stage and sang their timeless classics.
“Old friends, old friends
Sat on their park bench like bookends”
The song is about childhood friends who sit together on a park bench a lifetime of memories between them.
In the song, the characters are 70 and they find that fact to be strange.
Can you imagine us years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly
How terribly strange to be seventy
Where did life go, they wonder. And so do we all.
Back in ‘81, we were 16 and 17, we had just gotten our driver’s licenses and our first cars.
A green ‘67 Mustang for Ben, a ‘69 Karmann Ghia for Dewey and oddly, a 76 AMC Pacer for Scott who insisted that the car was really a squat version of a Porsche. Nice try…Scott.
Life for us, was just beginning. We were loving high school, chasing young women with mixed success, going to parties on weekends and watching something called a music video on a new station called MTV.
College, marriage, careers, children, homes, travel and all the other stuff was all ahead for us.
It was a special time. Our parents and grandparents and beloved aunts and uncles were alive and very much in our lives. The mysteries of life were still there to be experienced for the first time.
They were truly the “wonder years” and we were experiencing them together. We spent our time talking about the future into the wee hours of the morning on deserted beach roads on the east end of Long Island.
Last weekend, several of us left our lives behind to meet back home in Stony Brook for a quick mini-reunion. We visited old haunts, fell into old taunts and drank wine and bourbon way past our normal bedtimes.
We are 57 now. Still young and spry enough to kick up a little trouble but old enough to see that 70 year old man on the park bench and realize we are fast approaching that part of our lives if we are fortunate enough to get there. We know there are no guarantees.
A few of us have had scares and were left scarred by what life throws at all of us. A serious bout of melanoma, Covid, divorce, financial crises, business ups and downs and the loss of people we knew to cancer, heart attacks, strokes and crashes both plane and car.
Nobody gets out unscathed. It seems to be the law.
But it’s the “in betweens” that matter too. The joys which are so abundant.
We have all found love, we all have kids we are proud of, we have all done well in our careers. We have also experienced the joys of friendship. The flat out miracle of enduring bonds that formed when we were 5,6 and 8 years old that have lasted a half century.
From Nixon to Biden, from rotary dial phones to smart phones and from MTV to Netflix. The one constant for me and for the others has been each other.
We have been there for one another at every step of the journey and at this stage it’s a reasonable assumption that will always be true.
Together and collectively, we’ve travelled a million miles and gone a million places. I am so proud of these guys. They are good men in a world where that is not a given.
During the height of the pandemic, my oldest friend Dave, organized a regular Zoom call for all of us to gather and share wine, spirits and conversation. The zoom happy hours helped us all get through the isolation of lockdowns.
Those calls were a lifeline and a joy. Old stories that make us laugh, gaps in our memories filled, new stories and plenty of debates about the day’s news. I loved every call and they are ongoing.
When I got a bad case of Covid, I couldn’t participate for two months or so. But as I lay on my back too weak to sit up and too sick to walk across the room, I could count on a steady stream of texts from my brothers. Funny messages. Encouraging words. Hopeful questions. I felt the care and concern. And I thought “my goodness, I may never see these guys again.”
If Covid takes me out, I won’t be on that park bench when I’m 70 telling the story of that time in the parking lot of Mario’s… But, miraculously I made it home and back to the calls and my friends.
We resolved that when vaccines were out and it was safer to meet that we would get together.
We used to get together every few years as a group but life got in the way. We got busy. We all get busy.
But this time we met—back home where we came of age— together.
The details of the weekend are private but suffice it to say that we did a lot more worrisome things when we were teenage boy’s roaming those winding roads of the Three Villages in unsafe muscle cars with questionable brakes.
I do want to say that if you are lucky enough to have an old friend or two or 10, make sure to see them while you can. Zoom is great. So are texts. But live and in person beats Facebook, FaceTime and WhatsApp.
The park bench looms large these days. I can see it in a dozen years of so.
I hope to make it. I trust these guys will meet me there.