Old Farts Reunion: Phinal Phart

So the question is: can you visit your own youth?

Sure, as long as you can still see it from here. First you need to reassemble the old neighborhood. It's near the smell center of your brain. Fetch up the mimosa blossoms and the honeysuckle, the sweet humid fragrance of Gifford's Ice Cream Shoppe, and the taste of rain on a window screen. From there it's a short hop to the brick Colonials, the split-level "mid-centuries" that used to be called "new," and a particular rec room and bomb shelter with secrets in them.

Now you're ready to invite your old friends. You get a core group to loop together the threads of their various connections, add Google and the airline industry, and then your youth--or something like it--will show up one day on a lake in the Adirondacks. Friends Lake, in fact.

It's not going to be exactly the same. When we were all eighteen or so, there was that fizzy element of infatuation, barely submerged. Not many of us in this socially awkward group knew just what to do with it, but any observer could map it out. All you needed to do was was watch

us unroll our packs in whatever cabin we hiked to and negotiate the space, everyone willing to settle for mere proximity and possibility, the sleeping bags arranging themselves on the floor like iron filings obeying an invisible magnet. That part is pretty much gone now, at least I think it is, our attractions having been diluted into a comfortably low-key group crush.

That first day at Friends Lake was a scene thrumming with joy. Sometimes I stood to the side just to watch as new arrivals showed up and smiles bloomed around the room and laughter rolled in eddies. It was later in the evening that we began to catch up and reconnect in more intimate groups that shimmered and sparked on the deck, a bright constellation of friends.

Unless you've grown distracted or inattentive, you're still in touch with all the ages you've ever been. But it's a special gift to spend time with the people who loved us when we were young and full of the future, who can still make out the eighteen-year-olds at our centers. We have custody of each other's past. We can set our memories loose to roll around together until they shine again. Until each of us is a polished stone in someone else's pocket.

Then the week is part of your past too, and the whole thing slides away, and you can watch it go, one hand on your pocketful of stones and one hand on a slim new tether to the last memory.

Nothing changes.

Which, in my case, was that dreamy Bob Gearheart kissed me goodbye.

[On the cheek, Dave.]

[Not that cheek, Dave.]

Ah, Naustalgia

It wasn't until I got a scanner and began trying to immortalize old photos from my youth that I realized just how degraded many of them are. The black and white ones were amazing. I have albums full of black and white photographs that are only like an inch square and the scanner reveals details I never knew were there. I have a photo of my Dad and me playing recorders and I'd always wondered why he had the leather case for the recorder on his chest. It turns out it was his tie.

But the color ones were awful. Clothing deteriorated into pock-marked pools of color. Faces oranged up. Discrete areas of the photos ran together like sauces on a plate. From any archival standpoint, they were a disaster.

But now, thanks to the Instagram app, you can take a brand-spanking-new photograph and crud it up right off the bat. I'm at a loss to understand why you would want to do this, but evidently, there is a market for nostalgia for times you haven't even lived through.

I probably should be able to get this; we've been able to put a sepia-tone on photos for years, and it does look pretty cool. But not all old brown photographs are sepia-toned. My mom's old pics from the farm are not sepia-toned. That was North Dakota during the Dust Bowl, and those are full-color shots.

Still, it seems stupid. Why not develop an app, I thought maliciously, that will paste scratchy sounds over perfectly good music? Ahem. The VinylLove app is already doing it. The app will scour your tunes and put them in mandatory album order, so you have to listen to the crappy songs to get to the good ones, just like the old days, and it will layer random static noise over all of them. With luck, the next version will introduce skips. Well, why stop there, if we're going retro? Develop a game depicting the album cover on the screen and use your manual dexterity to roll seeds off of it while retaining your weed.

Dad on the left. This photo is 100 years old.

There's a new app called Square that allows you to pay for things using your phone, but there's no reason not to add an old-school version. If it's a Friday night, you can try to pay for something, but it won't go through until Monday after ten a.m., when the screen would depict, for fifteen minutes, an image of the butt of the person in front of you in line at the bank.

Your gigantic HD flat-screen TV will wink out at midnight and leave you with nothing but a fading star, the National Anthem, and a reason to go to bed already.

Your GPS system can quit giving you directions and instead recite a Burma-Shave poem, tell you to pull over to the side of the road and then send little puffs of blue smoke out from under your hood.

Shoot. You want nostalgia? You could have a Whiny App that would detect any sign of petulance on your part, and then give you something to cry about.

Going North

It was the usual hectic operation getting our friends Scott and K.C. moved out to begin with, in 1985, when they lived across the street. We should've known the city couldn't contain them. They already had a burgeoning collection of vehicles including a bulldozer and they had a dog and cats and a freaking horse and a herd of quail chicks and no one thought it would stop there. I can't remember if the herd of quail chicks was still around to be transported, or--I should say--all but the one K.C. tried to introduce to her cat, in the interest of interspecies harmony. The introduction was wildly successful from the cat's point of view, but no one else thought it went well.

We helped with the move, of course, but we were morose about it. They only moved fifty miles away, and assured us we had not driven them off. In fact, it was the prospect of jobs that pulled them away, good grown-up jobs. But our pinochle marathons were destined to be a rarer event. No longer could we expect to amble across the street and play cards into the night with whiskey and a platter of warm cookies. We were young and on the motley side, and we shuffled the deck on their incongruously grown-up new Queen Anne table, part of a meticulously polished set, a far cry from the cinderblock and board furnishings of their peers. That casual recreation, and our good friends, were leaving.

But it wasn't like they were gone forever. We visited as often as we could manage, with my oddball mailman schedule rarely cooperating with Dave's out-of-town trips to repair boilers. Scott and K.C. had more respectable occupations and were pinned down by the requirements of a growing menagerie of unemployed animals. Sheep, goats, alpacas, and the like blossomed on their green hillside, with their only obligation to be good sheep, goats, and alpacas. The pigs were the dearest of all. Diesel was the first, and Myrna joined him later. Well, it was always something over there. You just never knew. You might be given the task of trotting the duck and sturgeon chow down to the lower pond past the wine grapes, taking care not to slip in the peacock poop. Or, you might pass an afternoon tracking dinosaur prints in the snow until they resolved into an ill-tempered emu on the lam. The emus' job was to be good emus, but they sucked at it. A fully realized emu is an irascible beast. From a narrow human viewpoint, they're only good at a distance, or on a plate.

But jobs and opportunities change, and when K.C. was recently enticed again, the way was clear to take a new turn in life, one unmarked by the demands of ravenous sturgeon, and our friends are now headed north--way north--to find a new home with an attached airplane hangar and some biddable moose. No one can blame them. But melancholy still shoulders in. People have a way of accumulating a lot of stuff in twenty-five years, and now much of it is tabled up for an estate sale, the tawdry tableau that usually signals a death in the family and the diaspora of debris: former treasures rubbing up against half-boxes of cleanser, a life trivialized by sticky tags. The Queen Anne set stands proud, polished, unmarred, and for sale. Theirs is a gem of a little farm, with all its potential met, and it sparkles with decades of loving effort: the trout pond, the sturgeon pond, the guard ducks, two hills corrugated with grapevines, and this year's alpacas masticating away on the hilltop. A new couple is buying their own dream, ready-made, and they're going to tend the grapes and the animals, with youthful stamina and no particular notion that they will ever grow older.

But it twists the heart, to see the past all measured out on tables and trailers, the years having spun out in a blink, and as we leave, the last pig, Lily, comes out from the barn to stand in the sun and smile and be the best pig she can be. From a distance she doesn't seem any bigger than the lump in my throat. She's an old pig and doesn't have many more days in the sun. That's just the way it is.