The other day I had coffee with an old friend. Well, actually, she’s more than that. She’s a little like family, although we haven’t really spoken in years. She’s known my dad since their college days, and she was a good friend to my mother. She came to my stepmother’s recent memorial service. She hugged me and said, “We should have coffee,” and I thought maybe it was just one of those nice, small-talk things that you say when you see someone at a funeral. But she really meant it, because a couple weeks later she sent me a follow-up. I was so tickled, I can’t tell you. The older I get, the more I appreciate people who knew me and my family “way back when.” It’s meaningful to get different perspectives on common experiences and a joy to share memories about people we know and love.
We met at River Maiden in Vancouver Heights on a sunny morning. The coffee shop was hopping. Tables held groups of business people, church friends, mothers and children, remote workers pecking away at their laptops and seniors strolling in for their morning cuppa joe and a chat.
As we reminisced, we both commented on how nice it was to be around people again after two years of relative seclusion. She said that she’d tried to maintain some degree of normalcy but eventually the pandemic took its toll. I’d had a similar experience, I said. I’m a bit of an introvert and will happily spend long stretches of time by myself. That’s why the effects of isolation snuck up on me like a tiger in the jungle. I thought I was just fine until the claws of loneliness were already deep under my skin.
It made me think back to my childhood, when I was surrounded by people nearly all the time — school peers, church chums, my grandparents and parents and their large circle of friends (which included my coffee companion, her husband and children). Something was always happening, like a potluck or a get-together or choir practice or a church dance or a sleepover with my BFF. My parents regularly had friends over for dinner or we went to others’ houses. We vacationed in groups and hosted bridal showers and baby showers and went to the movies and went out to dinner. Our coffee pot got a real workout. My mom and grandma were always cooking or baking something to share, because where there were people, there was inevitably food.
