Mukoli

Across the Table from an Old Friend

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Several eons ago, sometime in the middle of the Obama administration, I met an old friend for coffee and put my foot in my mouth. 

He and I hadn’t been in touch since the 70’s and probably wouldn’t have gotten together then if not for the billion-headed monster Facebook created. As teenagers we weren’t close friends exactly, but we were part of our Connecticut hometown’s Jewish community, and that unofficial membership conferred upon us a world of happy common experience. 

I felt a special loyalty to my memories of this boy, who was always gravitating toward me at a time when I didn’t believe I exerted much pull. He was soft spoken, a close talker, perennial sidekick to the taller and more dashing boys of our teenage cohort. And if a crowd of us gathered around and begged, he would sometimes go into a warbling falsetto for his great Julia Child impression: “first you cut it, then you spear it, then you eat it,” followed by a finger kiss.

I learned from Facebook that he lived in suburban Jersey, not that far from Greenwich Village, where I live. He was coming to the city for a job interview, so I suggested we meet at my favorite Village café, which closed a year or two later.

He arrived pumped up from his interview. After we hugged, he told me he thought he had nailed it—except that the competition was fierce and he was no kid. The longer he talked, the more deflated he became. It turned out he’d been knocked around badly by the 2008 recession, with a wife suffering health problems and two grown kids with slim job prospects. I crossed my fingers for my old friend.

We settled in to reminiscing about our beloved Jewish Community Center on Long Island Sound with the teen musicals and bus trips to Rye Playland when we sang oldies until we were hoarse—this was the 70’s, when “party” became a verb and cachet derived not from being smarter or richer than your peers, but from being rowdier. 

We began pooling our knowledge of the old gang—the five Steves, the aloof girl with the perfect body, the flamboyant boy who was our first gay friend and also our first AIDS victim. I reported with disappointment on a favorite local educator: “I’ll always see him as this progressive young man, but now he’s old and conservative.”  

As we talked I felt a small but stubborn gap. I chalked it up to the human condition—the prospect of reminiscing with an old friend, I’ve found, is sometimes more delicious than the experience itself; my vague hopes for a key to my identity are always dashed because there is no such key. We began running out of people, so I mentioned a guy I will forever picture with stringy center-parted hair and a cloud of pot smoke swirling around him. I hear he’s become Orthodox and very conservative, I said. 

That’s when my friend, in a calm way that I admired, explained the gap: I’m conservative too, he said. He added: I don’t like to broadcast my views.

I don’t either, I said like an idiot. I rewound our conversation and realized I had used the word “conservative” three times, each time screwing up my face as if something had gone bad. 

What are the options when you realize you’ve been preaching, and not to the choir?   What I mean, I said, is that it bothers me when people become rigid. This wasn’t half of what I meant, but back then it still seemed possible to be more a social animal than a political one and I didn’t want to ruin the afternoon. Clearly trying to meet me halfway, he allowed that while he was no fan of Obama, he had grown used to him. He added that he was upset by Obama’s big Middle East speech. Okay, I thought, he’s the kind of Jew for whom the term “pre-1967 borders” touches a nerve. 

The funny thing is that my old friend did end up presenting me with a key to my identity, but not the one I had hoped for. I had hoped he would somehow shine a light on the complex, sometimes confused, occasionally wise package of personality traits and learned behaviors and beliefs I like to think add up to my “self.” I had hoped I might do the same for him. I had hoped our meeting might strengthen our bond rather than reveal it as something tenuous, with its roots in dead history. 

Instead I could practically hear him thinking: so she grew up into one of those smug, opinionated, urban liberals. I looked around me. The tattooed hipsters tapping on their Macs seemed smug, opinionated and liberal. Ditto the hand-chalked vegan menu and the oversized tea bags that I’d seen the café owner fill by hand. Even my appearance – Merrell clogs, knapsack – suddenly started to reek of liberalism. Of course he had just come from an interview, so he wore a suit and carried a briefcase, the hard square kind.

In a way it was true – not only did I “identify” (to use a term that hadn’t yet become common) as a liberal, I had over long years in Manhattan picked up the trappings. I called The New York Times “the paper.” I was prone to casual cultural oneupsmanship – Have you seen the Kara Walker yet?–which at best was a reflection of actual sophistication but at worst just a cheap currency we all carried, like Metrocards. I had friends who described themselves as flaming liberals, the way in conservative circles people liked to say they were “to the right of Genghis Khan.” 

I don’t know why I presumed that my friend shared my views. Maybe it was simply because much of what fell under the rubric of conservatism in those years of the rising Tea Party struck me as wildly extreme. Maybe it was because so many of the hometown friends I stayed in touch with started out as or developed into liberals. Maybe it was because he seemed so clearly a victim of the economic meltdown that began under the watch of a conservative administration.

I wish I could tell you that he and I went on to have a fruitful exchange, but even then, well before the 2016 presidential campaign, I was wary of trying to talk across political divides, never humanity’s strong suit. Even for those with much better debating skills, more statistics to deploy, and a thicker skin than mine, I had my doubts about whether it could be done successfully.

The lull grew uncomfortable. So, who else? he said, and we went back to cataloguing every Klein and Stabinsky in our town. 

One leitmotif of our conversation was my friend’s nostalgia for the 70’s. When I lived through them, I thought of those years as one long summer replacement series for the 60’s, the decade when the music died. It’s only recently that the 70’s have begun looking to me like a golden age and not just an earth-toned one. 

His nostalgia seemed to be strictly economic. “I didn’t think life would get so hard,” he said, shaking his head. He talked yearningly about how families could buy a house on a single income. Our town was anything but fancy, but most of our mothers were available to drive us to the JCC all summer long. When we turned 16 and got our licenses and use of a parent’s car, those of us who needed an afterschool job could easily find one.

My nostalgia was more social – the 70’s as the last great gasp of liberalism before the sharp right turn of 1980. My memory was that then, no matter what our politics or finances, the families of our town, at least the white ones, were more alike than different. It was an era of flannel shirts and Levi’s; most of us were not very flashy, and being progressive was generally seen as a good thing. 

The minute I got home I looked up the words “liberal” and “conservative,” trying to understand how two kids from the same town and time ended up in such different places. 

I was surprised by the last clause of the liberal definition: favoring political reforms tending toward democracy and personal freedom for the individual, which conservatives could just as easily claim as theirs. And I was surprised that rigidity was indeed built into the conservative definition: tending to preserve established traditions or institutions and to resist or oppose any changes in these. 

Funny, I thought, I have been known to resist changes to established traditions and institutions. I don’t like to solve problems by throwing money at them, which I believe means I’m a fiscal conservative. Sometimes I have struggled to keep track of which positions fell into which camp, and I’ve never been sure whether to blame this on my lack of political astuteness or on the fact that the terms have come unmoored and some of the players are lunatics. I have sometimes found myself wishing for a tax on sugary drinks. Is this a liberal or conservative stand? I have wished Americans would return to the more modest consumption habits of my grandparents’ generation; I have wished advertising were less salacious; don’t these sound like the stances of a conservative? 

Little did I anticipate that I would look back on that afternoon in the late aughts or early teens with the ache of nostalgia, for at least back then the discussion was still more or less courteous and the parties hadn’t fully splintered into two alternate realities. The general idea, I decided after my meeting with my old friend, was that the two terms connote two different notions about how to organize ourselves into a civil society, or should I say about how MUCH to organize ourselves, and about which aspects of life are our own damned business. I don’t know why it surprised me that this was the biggest fault line in our nation – show me a household, any household, and I’ll show you people bickering across the same divide. 

I reasoned then that our identity—political and otherwise—is an amalgam of many things: temperament, history, experience, education, religion, occupation, salary, the media we bring into our homes, the injustices we see or ignore and, last but hardly least, the people around us. Notice that back then I listed media as just one factor among many, and that I still thought of it as something we brought into our homes rather than curated propaganda that oozes into our addicted brains.

Me? Despite everything I will stick with hope and naiveté. I will stick with e pluribus unum: out of many, one. I believe we are a stronger and better people if we pool our resources to accomplish the things we can’t do alone. But this was not meant to be a political screed; those are a dime a dozen. This was a story of two old friends across a café table.

When our afternoon ran its course, my friend picked up his briefcase. He told me I looked fit and I told him he looked youthful, and I think we both meant what we said. An image of his family floated into my mind—his parents, short like mine and far younger than we are now, in their aluminum beach chairs at their regular spot by the pool. I saw him with a carful of rowdy friends in his family’s hunter-green VW, the Stones blaring on 77 WABC. I still have his yearbook picture. He wore a knitted vest and wrote me a mock-mushy note on the back. Who knows—maybe he still has mine. 

I don’t know who he voted for in the three elections that followed. I don’t think I want to know. What I do know is that he was always kind to me. Before we said goodbye, I told him how much I loved his Julia Child. He threw back his head and laughed for the only time all afternoon, almost as if I’d presented him with a key to a freer version of himself. 

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