Short Story. The Luncheon. It felt good to be back home. I had not visited Ryan in more than a year. He had just retired as a physical therapist. He had picked me up at the airport, dropped my bags off at his house, and we were on the way to the luncheon. We drove by the familiar fraternity and sorority houses along the southern edge of campus. Ryan reminded me about hanging a dead duck on the door of the Tri-Sig House. The legendary dead duck came to be known as Disco. Some stories never get old. I loved the campus even though it and the rust belt city had changed dramatically since the 70s when we were in college. In so many ways I didn’t know it anymore.
The visceral scream and the pounding of the steering wheel by Ryan caught me by surprise. “What’s wrong Ryan?”
“I’m just angry. You know when we were in college, we used to have factories all around here with all kinds of good paying labor union jobs. I watched them all leave the last 35 years and now they’re all completely gone. It’s like we’ve been left behind while other parts of America like where you live and work are getting richer. And what’s worse, no one listens to us, no one cares.”
I thought for a moment. “You know my Dad who worked on the railroad saw this coming. He pulled me aside, just after I had been accepted into a Ph.D. program in Texas. He said there is nothing for you here. You have the opportunity to get out and have your advanced education completely paid for. It’s time to go, don’t hesitate, and don’t look back except to visit. The factories are just beginning to shut down and coal will be on its way out soon enough. After that the railroads will follow. So, I left. I was one of the fortunate ones.”
“Yes, and the rest of us couldn’t get out and we’re being left behind. You know that unless you are a computer specialist, the only jobs are in the health care industry, education, finance, restaurants, and bars.”
Without thinking, my academic personae began to respond. “Ryan, it’s called deindustrialization. It didn’t just happen here, it was the entire rust belt region of the northeast and midwest. It also happened in the coal mining and factory regions of northern England, other parts of Europe, and Russia as well. These people are experiencing the very same feelings of being left out and left behind that people here are.”
I shouldn’t have mentioned coal mining. From my comfortable campus office in Texas, I had contributed an op-ed piece to the local newspaper here arguing that natural gas; cheaper, non-union coal in the west; green energy; technological advancements in coal that reduced the need for labor; declining global demand; and increasing healthcare costs for miners were responsible for the decline of the coal industry. I argued that the state had to begin to look to the future beyond coal. The article had angered some of my lifelong friends.
As soon as I had made the deindustrialization analysis to Ryan, I knew that I should not have responded as a professor. What he really wanted was his old friend to empathize with him, not to analyze the situation. After a silence between us that seemed to last an eternity, Ryan calmed and said, “I’m sorry Cliff. I’m just so tired of being put last. No one in the government gives a damn. No one in the government listens to us. No one in the government helps us. It’s like we are the forgotten people.”
I grasped for the right words but could only say, “I understand Ryan.” I then decided it was best to change the subject. “Hey, is Mark coming to the luncheon?”
Ryan picked up on my desire to change the topic, “Yes, Mark will be there but he’ll be late as always.” I laughed. Ryan was always on time, in fact, we used to tease him about getting to football games early enough to help set up bleachers. We were the first ones to arrive at the restaurant and we helped move chairs around the tables.
It was great to see so many of my old friends and to quickly catch up with what everyone was doing. Within no time, story after story after story was told of our exploits many years ago. Of course, the stories had gotten better with age. “Glory days” as Bruce Springsteen had put it. By the end of the luncheon there were growing silences as we had run out of old stories.
Terry, just as he had done so many times when we were growing up, conned us into helping him. After lunch we were sent on a wild goose chase looking for an artificial Christmas tree. Ryan, Mark, and I finally found one in a closet in one of the downtown churches that Terry had mentioned in a text message to us. We carried the tree out of the church and placed it in the back of Mark’s truck without speaking to anyone. The minister of the church was just walking by the truck. “Hi guys. I’m glad you found the tree that Sheila had already arranged to use over the holidays. Tell Terry and Sheila I said hello.” We laughed because it had seemed like we were doing something we weren’t supposed to do, something covert. It was just like reliving one of our old stories. Somethings never change.
Yet, somethings had changed. On the drive home, we didn’t say much and later that night at Ryan’s house, I began to think about the friendship that I valued so very dearly. We rarely saw each other after my wedding and after I had started my academic career in a very different region of the country. We led different lives in different environments. The few times I made it to back for the ballgames ended up like our luncheon today: old stories. There’s nothing wrong with old stories, but they only go so far. I had grown apart from my lifelong friends. This was neither bad thing nor a good thing. It was a simple fact. I guess Thomas Wolfe was correct, you really can’t go home again. The next day Ryan dropped me at the airport. We warmly hugged, promised to see each other more often, and I flew home. I came back the following fall for another ballgame and another reunion luncheon with my lifelong friends.
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