Old Friends / Bookends

Our conversation this morning reminded me of Simon and Garfunkel's song "Old Friends/Bookends," though we were not nearly as old as the two old friends in the song, and we bookended not a park bench but a continent, voices reaching each other without wires. You were sitting on your bed in New York and I was sitting on my bed in San Francisco, and we didn't talk for very long, because we both had work we were equally unenthusiastic about doing that nonetheless needed doing.

Neither of us was in particularly good spirits, and our reports to each other about our respective lives were a bit lackluster:
At least February's almost over, I said.
I'm just sick of being poor, you said.
I'm having a hard time feeling like my work is meaningful, I said.
I have to remind myself, when I have a bad day of it, that it takes years of practice to become a good teacher, you said.
I had a tough conversation with my parents last week, but at least I felt like they respected me, I said.
We spoke briefly of the people we were dating. So that's at least cool, on both ends, but of course we are old enough now to know that that's not enough.
Yeah, I've been pretty up and down recently, we said.

Ten years ago, when we first met, fellow young Americans in a foreign country, with everything to discover in the great land of abroad, I'm sure we thought that by the time we were 32 years old, we'd have it a little more together than this. You'd have the children you always wanted, and I would have published a novel. We'd at least be more secure than month to month. We'd have some clue of what our hearts wanted.

You'll get a kick out of this, you said, I'm picking hairs off the blanket on my bed while I talk to you, and I'm finding several different colors, from the different people who have spent the night here. I'm sure back when we met we both thought we'd be married by this age. How simple, the things we're told to want! How easy to want them when we are young!

Yeah, I just don't know why I can't seem to get anything done. I ruin whole days of work by going out too late the night before.
Yeah, things have been pretty up and down on my end, too.
Well I'd really better go, because I have a deadline for work.
Recognizing the exact timbre of despair in each other's voices.

Still, the brief conversation cheered me a bit. We have never lived closer than two hours from each other, and most of the time we've been friends, there has been either an ocean or a continent in between us. We've crashed in each other's living rooms and beds, we've visited each other in too many apartments to count. We've met each other's friends and significant others and we've reported back to each other from the various frontiers of our experiences: job changes, going back to school, falling in and out of love, transatlantic moves, cross-town bus rides. We've remodeled the various rooms of our lives and our world over drinks and smokes, on walks, on trains, on phones, in e-mails. And though we are wiser now, we also understand that this wisdom is our only tool for cutting a path through the unknown wilderness that grows only thicker as we age.

Maybe our world-weariness and our lack of direction would have dismayed our younger selves, but I have a feeling those two old guys on the bench in Paul Simon's song would just scoff and perhaps ruffle our hair, as if we were their grandchildren. Old? What do you know from old? Talk to me 50 years from now, then you can tell me about old. Quarter-life crisis? No such thing in my day. We were too busy fleeing the war, learning English, working in factories to support our families. When we could sit on a park bench with a newspaper and a smoke, now that was a good day.

Then my imagination's off and running: how terribly strange will it be to be seventy? If we make it that far, and for myself I am doubtful. Then I start wondering if there will even be park benches then, if there'll still be newspapers, if there'll still be grass. Our lives may look much different outwardly from the two old friends in the song, but the feeling of the song, that will be there, and I hope we will be too.

Today, before I get to work, I stroll down a city street of my imagination, pick up two cups of coffee to go, and meet you on a park bench, where we sit in companionable silence, at whatever age it is that we are, in the timelessness of the wind blowing leaves and paper over our round-toed shoes.