You Can Go Home Again

I have to respectfully disagree with the great author Thomas Wolfe, who claimed that you can’t go home again. For 36 hours during the first weekend of May (sorry this is so late), I was able to return to my days at Valpo, hanging out with Anna and the Boys. The “Boys” consisted of myself, Steve Moss, James Chang (my roommate for four years--what a saint) and Baron Brendel, and the role of Anna was played by none other than Anna Bickel (rhymes with pickle). We had known each other for varying lengths of time (Steve, James and I had been friends since move-in day freshman year), but for our final two years of college, we were always together. The most impressive thing about us hanging out together (or least impressive depending on your point of view) was that we managed to do a lot without ever doing very much. We spent a vast majority of our time together watching movies or just sitting around and talking because no one was decisive enough to come up with something better to do.

After graduation, we all went our separate ways and spread out across the Midwest. Anna and Baron got married (not to each other, that would have been a little strange), and Baron moved to Lafayette, Indiana with his wife Abby, while Anna and her husband Shawn lived first in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and have since moved to Saint Louis. James works for an engineering company just outside Chicago, and Steve returned to his hometown of Highland, Indiana, while I am splitting my time between Saint Joseph and Ann Arbor. Before last weekend, all five of us had been together twice since graduation. Once was at Baron and Abby’s wedding, while the other was at homecoming in October 2005. We had made various attempts to get everyone together since then, but life (work, school, et cetera) always managed to get in the way. In March, Anna decided that 2.5 years was long enough without a complete powwow, and she began the process of making sure everyone cleared their schedules to make some time to get together. After a consensus about a time was reached, we settled on Baron and Abby’s house in Lafayette (it’s still weird for me to think that some friends of mine own a house, but I digress), as it was a central location between Chicago/Northwest Indiana/The Joe and Saint Louis.

When we all finally arrived at Baron’s on Saturday, we had a fair amount of catching up to do. Since the last time we were all together: Anna was married, moved to Saint Louis and began doing more work teaching; Steve earned a much-deserved promotion at his bank and had purchased a new truck; James traveled across the country for his company and nearly took a job at the Baltimore branch; Baron bought a house and a new car, and he also began doing some radio work, in addition to his efforts at Lafayette’s CBS affiliate WLFI; and I had completed 18 months at the Herald-Palladium and had decided to go back to school. I think most of us had heard about the changes in each other’s lives since late 2005, but it was good to hear everything again and even to pick up on some of the details that had been missed the first time.

After the reminiscing, we resorted to doing what we did best…nothing. I won’t bore you with all the details (and if you’ve read this far, I commend you), but Baron grilled out, we spent a lot of time talking, and then we bowled, played cards and video games. In 24 hours (although it seemed much shorter than that, Anna and Shawn had to get back on the road to get to Saint Louis. Farewells were exchanged and promises were made to keep in touch. We even said we might try to get down to Saint Louis, and Anna promised to see if she could bribe us with baseball tickets. Everyone came away feeling that it had been far too long since we had been together, and we even began the initial phases of planning our next adventure. The shortness of the gathering was both a curse and a blessing. We discovered (although we already knew) that we could spend a week (or more) together and things would not get awkward. There’s always the possibility that when spouses are added, things could get strange, but that never happened. Perhaps next time, it will feel like “Anna and Abby and the Boys.” The brevity turned out to be a blessing because it reinforced the idea that we need to get together more. It is certainly not easy to arrange the schedules of seven people so that they all can get together, but I am certain that the next time one of the e-mails about getting together goes out, we will work a little harder to make sure we can get together.

You would have to ask everyone else if they agree (although I have a suspicion they will), but I certainly felt like we were back at Valpo for the weekend. Yes, the local had changed, and we were all a little older and the group now numbered seven instead of five, but the people were still the same. Anna and James still bickered, Baron was still the Big Fat Guy (although slimmer than the last time I had seen him), Steve was exactly the same, and I would like to think that I am the same guy I was three years ago. As long as the people don’t change, every get together will feel like going back to that familiar place where we first met. And in those times, we can go home again.