Feels Like Old Times

Feels Like Old Times

“So, it was the third of May and the year was nineteen sixty-three.”

“Sixty-two!”

“No, it was the spring of sixty-three.”

“I’m telling you. It was Sixty-two.”

“It doesn’t matter, okay?”

“Yes, it does because I can’t believe you don’t remember what year it was.”

“I do remember, it was sixty-three! Listen! Today is the… uh… 57th anniversary. Two thousand twenty minus one thousand nine hundred and sixty-three is Fifty-seven. Okay?”

“Well, it’s not important anyway.”

“So now that you’re wrong it’s not important, huh.”

“You are so difficult today.”

John leans over and plants a kiss on Meredith’s cheek and smiles, “I know I am. On with the story, okay?”

“Okay,” says Meredith, blushing.

The Watson family had all gathered on the front porch of the old progenitors’ house for their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary, which uncoincidentally coincides with the same day as their first date two years before. They all don masks, and the birds around them are having no respect for the gravity of the ritual, chirping away as always, though Meredith and John wouldn’t have it any other way. Every five years or so, all the relatives close enough to make it drive anywhere from five to one-hundred and five miles to pay their respects to the series of events that brought about their existence on this earth, for which, during this year as COVID tears across the country, they are really only passively grateful for.

Meredith starts this time, “It was the spring of nineteen sixty-three,” she gives John a lovingly irritated look, “and my dear friend Judith, God rest her soul, had met a boy named,” she pauses in recollection, “Fred. No, Frank.” She looked at John for confirmation, and he gave her a look that she understood, after forty-five years of marriage to mean, I think so, but on with it. She says, “Yes, Frank. I had met Frank a few times and he was handsome, and he flirted with me a little, but he really wanted a date with her, and she said no. I can’t remember why. Honey, do you remember why?”

John answers, “I do. She had just gotten out of an awful relationship with a man named Eric Williams, who she said looked and talked just like Frank.”

John continues forgetting his audience, “Do you remember how Judith used to come over here up on this porch and jabber on for hours about how she would’ve been a dancer in the Follies if she hadn’t married that ungrateful son of a bitch, Eric!”

Meredith joins now, “She said she met Martha Graham once. She wasn’t impressed.”

Most of the little ones at this point have lost patience and are starting to move around a lot.

“She was so funny,”

A butterfly just landed on baby Ruth’s crossed leg and she’s frozen in absolute reverence.

“She brought the house down, even if it was just you and me.”

A little voice whispers to his matriarch, “Who’s Martha Graham?”

A hushed response: “A dancer.”

James, John and Meredith’s oldest son, puts his hand on his mother’s knee, reminding her of the task at hand.

“Oh, yes. Sorry! So, it was the spring of nineteen thirty-seven,”

She pauses and watches the faces before her, then she chuckles to herself, “I’m just kidding, I’m just kidding! So, when Frank finally asked Judith on a date, she didn’t want to, but she didn’t have much of an affinity for delivering bad news, so she said she simply couldn’t date him because I was completely smitten with him and it would break my heart.”

The room is back to full attention.

“So, I get a call from Judith on the house phone,” she addresses what feels to her like the elephant in the room, “You young ones won’t know this, but it used to be that you had a big phone in your house that didn’t have any brick breaker or candy crush and all you could do was call people or get called by people.” This is, of course, news to no one. John is looking at her with a sweet, subtly performative annoyance that makes all the ladies on the porch feel warm–like they can’t wait to be looked at like that when they grow old with someone. During the brief lull in their story, Brody, still ripe with boyhood, reaches over to a honeysuckle bush and plucks off a flower. He leans over to his little brother, Payton, and he demonstrates how to extract the nectar. Payton tastes it and his eyes widen with surprise.

Meredith continues, “She tells me I have a date next Friday at 6 P.M. at a Italian restaurant downtown. I said what? Who with? And she told me it was with Frank,” she paused to think of a last name, “Harville. Frank Harville.” Meredith said, “I told her she better call him and cancel because I don’t want a date with no Frank Harville. She told me there’s no harm in a free meal, and thank the Lord, I caved. Next Friday evening at 6 P.M., I dressed myself up pretty as I could bear and made my way down to that little Italian restaurant downtown.”

John butts in, “That very night at 6 P.M., I was working at a little Italian restaurant downtown. I had been working as a host there for a year or two. Come six o’clock, I saw the most beautiful woman I had ever lain eyes on walk through the front door, and I went so weak at the knees, I nearly crumpled there before her.”

Meredith, blushing again, interjects, “Every time he tells this story his knees get a little weaker.”

John says, “Well that’s how it felt. Maybe I just get a little more accurate describing how I felt, huh?” Meredith can’t wipe a grin off her face. She continues, “So John walks me to my table for two and I sit down, and I wait. And I wait… and I wait.”

John jumps in, “Mind you, once I noticed she was getting stood up, I’m over at the front door praying to God that no handsome young men walk through the door.”

Meredith says, “Well, God saw us through because Frank never did come through that door.”

John says, “I, after about an hour, I was sweating because I knew she’d get up and leave any moment. I decided I would send her the most expensive wine on the menu I could afford, a 1961 San Giusto a Rentennano ‘La Ricolma’ Merlot Toscana. It was seventy-five dollars which was about all the money I had made that week.”

Meredith jumps in, “You should have seen the look on my face when that bottle showed up at our table!”

John adds, “I got in so much trouble with my manager that night, but it was so worth it. I called over the owner, with whom I’d become good friends, and I told him, please can I clock out? I think I’m in love! He confirmed how beautiful the girl was and, less than enthused, took on my duties as a host. I walked over to her table in the biggest stroke of bravery I think I’d ever mustered and sat down and got real honest with her. I told her I couldn’t take my eyes off her since she walked in the door, and I told her it looked like the rest of her night just freed up and I asked if she might want to spend it with me.”

A voice calls out from the kitchen, “Dinner is almost ready!”

“Almost done!” yells Meredith at the top of her old lungs. She continues, “I thought he was insane. I thought he was actually insane. But I also thought he was handsome, and he was right about my plans falling through, so I gave him a chance, and I had one of the best dinners of my life. I laughed till I cried,” she pauses and smiles at her husband and notices that he’s older now, “and he walked me home.” She closes her eyes, so engulfed in that memory that her eyes well up, and she takes John’s hand into hers, and as she pulls a breath deep into her belly, she smells that sweet spring honeysuckle smell so potent she can almost taste it, so constant it hasn’t changed in 57 years. She feels the breeze on her face, and for a moment she feels those same feelings in her stomach that she felt 45 years ago, unmarred by her many years. For this moment, all of the restless legs settle, and there is no human noise. Just the birds, and the whistle of the breeze.

The same voice calls out, “Dinner is ready!”

Finally, John squeezes her hand lightly and chips in, “And, as they say, the rest is history.”

.....

“It’s hard to believe just a year and a day ago she was right here next to me, holding my hand.”

“I know, Dad. I know.”

James reaches out and holds his father’s hand.

“I feel so close to her right now with the weather so nice. I still round the corner and think she’ll be there half the time.”

They sit in a familiar, comfortable silence.

James has a moment of indecision, then he settles himself and says, “I’ll be right back.”

James stands up and quietly heads off to the kitchen. John peels off his mask.

John sits in his two-person rocker and enjoys the sounds and smells of spring. There is a dogwood in late bloom, and he thinks it might be his favorite tree.

James returns with both hands behind his back and says, “I wasn’t supposed to show you before dinner, but I got too excited.” Out from behind his back, he brings out two crystal wine glasses in one hand, and a bottle of red wine in the other. He sets the glasses in front of his dad and presents the label to him imitating a server. John’s eyes widen.

“Does this suit you, sir.” He adds in his most tasteful Michael Cain impersonation. John finds this to be a nice touch.

John sees the old Italian label, San Giusto a Rentennano. “How did you find it?”

“Mom kept the receipt, in a junk box in the basement. I was able to find it from an online wine retailer.”

John is in disbelief. James’ wife brings out a decanter, and he aerates the bottle. John can’t help but lean over the decanter and take a whiff of the bottle of wine that changed his life forever. His son pours two glasses and as the flavor hits his tongue, he gets lost in the moment. He experiences his youth on his tongue, and he is hit with the same exhilarating uncertainty of the moment he sat down to fall in love with the woman of his dreams.