Bob, who was due to and did arrive two hours later, had asked me what he and Mary Beth should wear, and I had said whatever they liked and that I'd probably wear something festive. I added:
“I bet Barclay will wear either a black T-shirt or a Hawaiian shirt.”
Barclay arrived in a black T-shirt and changed into a Hawaiian shirt before the party: we've known each other a long time. I had planned to change into a new animal-print dress, but ended up just staying in good old Marimekko. I am half-Finnish after all! I also forgot to take off my hairband and arrange my hair. I've often thought that one sign of being middle-aged is that when you're giving a party, you care more about how the house looks than how you look — not that I am middle-aged any more. At 70, you are at the start of old age. Young, old, or middle-aged, I always cared how the food tasted!
Me, Barclay, Kate before the party — sadly, no photos of them in their party clothes
That hasn't changed — and my old friends haven't, either. Guy and Bob were room-mates as second-formers at our boarding school. They were kind, pleasant people at school and they still are: just more at ease with themselves than they were as boys.
Guy, Bob, and Mary Beth, Bob's wife, all arrived at the same time — Guy told me later that Bob had wanted to go through their songs together before the party, so he'd gone to their airbnb. The men wore khaki shorts and shirts with collars — Hawaiian for Barclay (he used to get his shirts in Hawaii when he travelled there on business!), blue Oxford cloth for Bob, and yellow polo for Guy.
Conversation was lively from the start. We drank champagne — even the beer drinkers, Guy and Barclay — taking our flutes from a round gold tray (maddeningly, I couldn't find the edible flakes of real gold I'd set aside to shake into everyone's glasses). I nipped into the kitchen to look again while another friend, who couldn't come because he was in Berlin, talked to everyone on speaker phone; but I couldn't find them. I made myself stop looking but I did describe them:
“For our 'golden years' — and all of our birthdays! Just pretend they're there.”
Conversation was lively from the start, and everyone exclaimed gratifying about how beautiful things looked, not just the view and the flowers but the tables. And they did: everything on the drinks table was white and gold; even the curried shrimp dip sat in a glass bowl on another round gold tray filled with potato chips. People kept commenting on how beautiful it all was and how good the food tasted.
Maybe because we had all been socially-isolating, everyone seemed extra-happy and even excited to be together. Kate and Mary Beth, who had never met each other before though they knew the rest of us, talked just as much as their husbands. In fact, Kate talked more than Barclay and seemed excited, too. We laughed a lot, as we always have, not just when people were witty or told good stories, but at silly things.
About half the time someone went inside or emerged, he walked into the screen door, knocking it out of its tracks. I did it just as often as everyone but Barclay did. Barclay got colored magnets — a red pepper, a yellow taxi — from the refrigerator and put one on each side of the screen; but we still kept walking into the door. Each time it clattered down, someone said,
“Don't worry. Barclay will fix it.”
And he did. He was after all the one who built a rocket that actually flew and carried a rat, named for our Headmaster, into the sky.
We sat down only when it was time to eat dinner — me at the end closest to the kitchen, Bob & Mary Beth beside each other at the other end, Guy alone on one side, Barclay on my left with Kate between him and Bob. I asked if someone would say a blessing: Guy doesn't like to be put on the spot, and he and Barclay are both rather introverted, so I was going to nominate Bob. But Barclay said, firmly,
“Guy.”
That was right. We all held hands. Guy said something brief and eloquent and heartfelt about how lucky he felt and how grateful he was for our friendship, and for all being together — he gave thanks for all that — but I don't remember how he put it. Well and gracefully, though! Guy and Barclay both squeezed my hands at the end, and everyone smiled at everyone else and commented on the blessing.
Mary Beth, Kate, and Bob, all raise funds for non-profits. We laughed and groaned at Bob and Mary Beth's tale of dinner with a big, conservative donor. They'd driven to Vermont and when they sat down:
“He likes to stick it to me, and he said, ‘Let's all raise a glass to Kavanaugh,' ” Bob said.
“What did you do?”
“Gritted my teeth and raised my glass — I had to support my wife.”
I kept an eye on the food and wine, but rarely needed to bring out more of anything. The next day, when I commented to Kate and Barc on how few bottles of champagne we finished, Kate said that Bob and Mary Beth only had one or two glasses each.
“I only noticed because I was sitting next to them.”
Serving the dessert, which I hadn't planned, worked out as easily as everything else had. As Bob said,
“How do you want to do this? You can't carry in your own cake!”
So I put in the tall pale yellow tapers (7 of them) and the yellow nasturtium blossoms (10); then sat down outside and the others lit the candles and the sparklers and carried in the cake, singing “Happy Birthday.”
I made a wish, blew out the candles, and said that at my 18th birthday party (Bob was there!), I'd wished that we'd all stay friends. Most of us have. Some have died. One or two of us no longer like each other. But many of us still see each other once or twice a year, and call, and write; and celebrate. Like Guy, I am grateful for that.
After dinner Guy and Bob played guitar and sang; and we joined in on some, but not all, of the songs. As I said to Guy after “Thirsty Boots” (with which he always concludes when he comes down here for lunch and sings and plays to me afterwards),
“I've been hearing you play and sing that for over fifty years” —first in college, when he was in a band—
“and I've never heard you sing and play it so well.”
Now that we're old, the lines I imagine that the lines about traveling and staying put — “so take off your thirsty boots and stay for awhile” are for me, though of course they were always in the song and I never thought that when we were young. I do travel a lot now. Whatever Guy thinks about that, he has a beautiful voice and great phrasing, with just enough but not too much emotion.
Bob sang “Blue,” (video link below), which as he said, “is a song about loyalty.” He sang it at the brunch the morning after his 70th birthday — one of the last parties before the Pandemic (many of us turn three score and ten this year). He was playing and singing with people he's been in bands with over the years, and in the middle of “Blue,” he just stopped.
“Bob? Bob?”
He looked up — and Bob (as his son had said in his toast to his father the night before, “never one to leave a feeling unexpressed”) was crying.
“It's all just too much,” Bob said.
I didn't want to cry at my party, so I had said: no toasts. No one cried — even when Bob sang “Blue,” though it's a sad song (“Vet said Blue, you're huntins' done,”) — and that, too, maybe means something different now that we're 70.
After “Blue,” we sang along; most of us remembered the words. They were the songs of our youth, after all — we'd seen the Grateful Dead sing some of them, live at the Cafe au Gogo and in the gymn at MIT and outside someplace in Connecticut. And now here we were, fifty years on, singing.
My heart felt full. I am not just “privileged” in the ways all of us who grew up with opportunities and parents who, whatever their faults, believed we were talented and gave us good manners and good educations are. I am blessed in my friends — not just those at the party, people on Coll, other old friends, the Blue Rose Girls, neighbors, and some of my siblings. They all made me feel loved on my birthday, and I remember that feeling on the (inevitable even before the Pandemic) days when I don't see anyone.
