The Trial of Meeting Old Friends

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

March 7, 1959

   PERIODICALLY you cross paths with someone you haven't seen for from 15 to 50 years.  This is supposed to be thrilling.  For many it is.  For me it isn't.  All I get out of it is new inferiority.  My old friends are so blessed with abundance that I feel like a shoe-shine boy.

   I used to dream of bumping into a former comrade selling pencils on the corner so I could pop a coin into his hat and feel superior.  The dream has turned to dust.  I'm always the guy selling the pencils.  

   These old friends of mine smoke 50 cent cigars, drive cars 40 feet long, eat as casually in swank restaurants as I eat in drug stores, and are always vacationing in Bermuda.  They have been everywhere, can talk about anything, and what they don't know is inconsequential.

   WHENEVER they come to town and phone I'm immediately apprehensive.  I lie, parry and stall, hoping to steer them from my humble refuge.  But my hard-to-impress wife, who considers friendship above crass materialism, wonders why I never ask them home to dinner.

   She says their prosperity probably is phony and if they weren't on expense accounts they'd starve.  If a friend is a friend, she says, he appreciates your hospitality and I should get over my silly complex.

   But my complex is disgustingly durable.  It applies even to relatives.  I blanch at the thought of encountering a certain cousin I haven't seen since the last war was the Spanish-American.  I recall her as a pretty girl with black curls--the great love of my childhood.

   I heard from her a while back.  She apparently has the notion that all newspaper folk are characters and she'd like to see me again.  The desire is mutual, but when we meet she'll see a tired man wearing a tired blue serge and a tired smile.  But she will be beautiful still, beautiful and radiant and charming.  My lot is to suffer invariably by comparison.

   FRIENDS who traffic in soft soap sometimes tell me they know someone who is eager to meet me and they are going to arrange it.  How about dinner two weeks from Friday?  Anyone else might feel flattered.  I feel a chill.

   Whenever such a confrontation occurs I'm at my worst.  My worst is very bad, bordering on imbecility.  Billed as the life of the party, as one who spouts witticisms like a slot machine disgorging quarters, I state the obvious about the weather and then stand mute, letting my wife carry on from there.

   If the hostess suggests bridge, and she always does, I cast a wild eye for the nearest exit.  I know my partner will be that person who wanted to meet the newspaper chap.  The next 30 minutes will seem like years to us both.

   WHILE the thought is repugnant, perhaps the "character" pose is the best defense.  It might be smart to grow sideburns three inches long, or wear a full beard and a dirty shirt, both flecked with cigar ashes, and assume an attitude of boorish indifference.

   In such a getup one could be an eccentric instead of a wet blanket, a tyrant instead of a washout.  Let someone propose bridge and you could roar, "To hell with it!  Bridge is for morons!"  This sounds autocratic enough to chill and impress even a sophisticate.

   If you had nothing to say you wouldn't have to say it.  You could take shelter in a huff or feign meditation.  Bieng a character, this would be part of your act.  If asked for an opinion--which I seldom have--you could sneer loftily and say the question was academic.

   But I'm dreaming again.  I couldn't bring it off.  I was reared in the country and the country is with me still.  I can be only myself.  It isn't enough, but it will have to do.

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