I had dinner late Friday evening across the street from the bus station, a statement that may conjure an image of my holding a fork like a shank while I sit on a padded stool at a slightly grimy counter, warily watching the door, a short and curvy water glass sweating in front of me, a slightly battered fedora beside me. This image would be all wrong. For one thing, Savannah has reimagined its bus station as the Joe Murray Rivers, Jr., Intermodal Transit Center, and in addition to the high-falutin’ name, it has embraced and enhanced the 50s modern style of its design. The bus station now looks like this:
And rather than being a good place to meet “interesting” friends and procure less-than-legal substances, the area around the bus station has been revitalized with hotels and restaurants. So on Friday night, rather than having a big-haired waitress in a frilly apron scratching our order on a small green pad, a bald hipster with impressive facial hair in a plain apron committed our order to memory. Chris and I were having dinner in the best French restaurant in town, for it was his birthday, and birthdays demand celebration.
Before we go much further in this story, I need to tell you that since it was a French restaurant, the menu included sweetbreads. “Sweetbreads” is my least favorite word in the entire world, for instead of getting cinnamon rolls and gooey pastries, a diner gets organ meat. Organ meat! I have long thought about printing T-shirts that announce SWEETBREADS ARE OFFAL, but other than my sister, I can imagine no other enthusiastic wearers.
Needless to say, I did not order the sweetbreads.
After the wine arrived, and as I raised a glass to toast the beloved man across the table, someone started talking very loudly about college football at the sedate wooden bar. This prompted a bit of an existential crisis for me, for how was I to focus on Chris when such a lively subject matter was at hand? I doubled down and made it through the tribute right as I heard the loud man ask, “So who was the greatest college football coach in history?”
“That’s easy,” I thought. For clearly the answer is Bear Bryant.
And as another man at the bar uttered, “That’s easy. Clearly the answer is Bear Bryant,” I glanced over my left shoulder to glimpse the original speaker, the very loud man, and it was not at all what I expected to see: He wore dirty blue jeans, a camouflage ball cap that never left his head, well-used work boots, and a hooded sweatshirt that shilled for “Off the Hook,” a restaurant in New Jersey. My immediate thought was that he had wandered off the bus. But then I looked at the meal spread in front of him — a glass of white white, a loaf of bread, a bowl of soup — and I heard him address the bartender by name and I listened as he commented that the music in the place (Ella Fitzgerald, Edith Piaf) was the best in town and I marveled as he made menu suggestions to everyone else sitting at the bar. And it hit me: He was a regular.
I love when people surprise me.
Because of that surprise, I eavesdropped more than usual and I particularly mulled over Off the Hook’s observation that Steve Spurrier was the greatest living college football coach, a statement that would have made me thrown my visor if only I’d been wearing one. And in between eavesdropping and thinking and not eating sweetbreads, Chris and I talked about the year almost behind us and the year almost ahead.
I did not ask Chris if he had any resolutions this year, because I already knew the answer: Chris would tell me, as he has told me for years, that he would try to be a better person. I used to find this answer maddening — an amorphous concept without any action plan — but lately, I have begun to see its elegance, for all resolutions have this at their heart. Perhaps part of my problem is that I have historically been a lousy judge of myself, with little clear idea of exactly who I am.
Take, for instance, the time in my 20s when I told a group of friends that I was laid-back. There was a pause, followed by uproarious laughter. Or a few weeks ago, having had a satisfying day of sewing, knitting, writing, and gardening, when I announced that all of this creativity was new for me. And Chris — who has known me since I was 17 — assured me that it was not.
The recent burst of creativity has helped me understand the whole “better person” thing. I took a metalsmithing course in 2016, and having a successfully soldered and shaped circle was only part of it. There was a lot of finish work — incessant filing, sanding, hammering, polishing, followed by even more incessant filing, sanding, hammering, polishing. I would create a bracelet, and it was very satisfying, that moment of immediate gratification. But I would try it on, and all of the burrs in the metal would become obvious. They would catch my skin, and they would scratch me. It was tempting to ignore them and continue wearing the bracelet nonetheless, and it required more discipline than I wanted to muster to remove them. But I did. And as I work on myself, I think about this often, the literal sanding down of the rough edges and how much easier that makes wearing the creation.
Knitting has helped, too, because there is one constant in that pursuit: I am going to screw up. Every single time. The stitches slip off the needle, a loop gets dropped, a knot gets tied imperfectly, a pattern is ignored. One of the beauties of knitting more is not just that I get better at knitting, but that I get better at fixing the mistakes I make and living with the mistakes that I cannot.
But as I sat with Chris at that table on Friday night, we talked not of resolutions or metal burrs or dropped stitches, but of our life together. It had been an eventful and largely good week: a trip to see family, a party, time with our children, even Christmas. There was his birthday. There was 2017 just around the corner. But in the midst of all of these very good things, I struggled with the death of one of my best friends from high school — a sweet, funny and kind girl, with a halo of blonde hair and big blue eyes. She had survived cancer and a bone marrow transplant, only to be felled by pneumonia on Christmas day. Thanks to time, distance, several moves, and a certain lackadaisical attitude on my part about maintaining the friendship, we had fallen mostly out of touch, but still in touch enough for her death to hit me hard and bring back all sorts of memories.
About a decade ago, I asked my friend Holly if she would be at swim practice the next morning. Holly — who was then about my age now — said that she had no idea, that everything changed so much and so frequently that she never had any idea what the next day held. It may have been a throwaway remark for her, but it is one that has grown truer for me day by day. Things change. Things grow. Things get renamed, reimagined, reinvented. But fundamentally they remain the same: a bus stop, a restaurant, a friendship, a marriage, love. In the face of all of that flux, all that I can resolve to do is to try to be a better person. To work on smoothing the rough edges. To continue trying. To learn how to fix the errors. To be comfortable with the ones I cannot.
Dessert snapped me out of my reverie. Since I could not help but mentioning that it was Chris’ birthday, the restaurant brought out a celebratory dessert at my very favorite price: free. It was a chocolate mousse with two palmieres, accompanied by two small glasses of fortified wine. As the scent of chocolate wafted up and I raised my glass to toast Chris again, I heard Off the Hook droning on in the background, and I more than anything else, I felt overwhelmingly grateful — for among other things, I had not resolved to lose those pesky ten pounds.
ALC