Two States at Once

A story from before the experiment

It’s Christmas Day and I’m sitting in a hot tub with my wife, being serenaded by my seventy-five-year-old father-in-law. What — that’s not your holiday tradition?

We’re singing along to the oldies and he knows them all — Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jim Croce — and we’re having a good ol’ time. Until he starts playing Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” and I feel like I’ve been sucker-punched.

That song always reminds me of my oldest friend from high school, Carol. The month before, unexpectedly, inexplicably, at fifty-one years old, she died. And I didn’t get to say goodbye. I don’t blame her family for keeping their privacy. I blame Facebook. I saw her every day…there she is at a Fleetwood Mac concert, there she is at the beach with her grandkids. I hearted the photos. I knew everything and I knew nothing. Somewhere in all those years of scrolling we stopped being people who called each other and became people who watched each other. We just lost touch, except it never felt like it.

It was like a minute ago that we were walking across the school parking lot, seventeen years old. Though honestly, Carol might have been fifty-one her entire life. She loved the oldies. She wore mom jeans and carried a big old purse. At seventeen she had a full-time job, a forty-year-old boyfriend, and drove a wood-paneled station wagon.

What I wish I could have told her was how much that summer before I left for college meant to me. We waited tables together at The Golden Bear, a local diner, and hung out almost every day, driving around in that station wagon while I got my education in the oldies…The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, The Drifters. If we sang “Under the Boardwalk” once, we sang it five hundred times at the top of our lungs. Driving to Great America, or across the state line to underage drink at our friend Donny’s bar in Kenosha. Every time we crossed the line she’d shout, “We’re in two states at once!” Every. Single. Time. We always ended up back at the Golden Bear, drinking coffee, talking and laughing like crazy. To this day I overtip — not just because we waited tables, but because Carol was always so generous, grabbing wads of singles out of that giant purse and throwing them on the table as we ran out the door, making some server’s night.

Back in the hot tub, the memories bubble to the surface easily. But so do the regrets, the woulda-coulda-shouldas. All I want to do is escape. Not because of the sadness, exactly, but because I can feel it all coming up in front of my father-in-law, in a hot tub, on Christmas. The song ends and I grab a towel.

But before I can get out, my wife — who has a keen intuition — says, out of nowhere, “Hey Dad, what’s that one about the tar melting on the roof or something?”

I stop short. I know what song she means. A song my father-in-law, in fifteen years of me being part of this family, has never played.

And without missing a beat, he starts to sing it.

And what happens next is almost indescribable, but I’ll try. The tingles. In my legs and shooting up, warm and buzzy, through my torso, my shoulders, and in a blink enveloping me completely. Just wrapping me up, like a hug from a friend.

Carol is right there. Not a memory of Carol. Carol. And what she is saying, without a single word, is: it’s okay. The goodbye I didn’t get to say, she came to say instead.

So what else can I do? I belt it out like the old days.

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