Do you ever have those nostalgic experiences where you feel like you’re in high school again –– like when you forget your driver’s license and get turned away empty handed at the liquor store, or you find yourself drinking a tropical Bartles & Jaymes wine cooler because that’s the only beverage you could get your hands on?
Wine coolers and other malted beverages –– if they don’t take you back, we probably had different life experiences growing up.
In April I had the chance to get out of town and visit some old friends in San Francisco. I have a very dependable circle of friends here in town, but my flight out of Lexington was at 5:30 a.m., and I wasn’t about to solicit a lift from any of them out to the airport at that hour. Grueling favors are a sure way to lose friends, that and pushing wine coolers on them.
So I called a cab, thanked my driver kindly for his company and punctuality, and I was on my way after leaving him a respectable tip; I have a habit of tipping generously whenever I need a taxi ride –– if something happens and the driver is the last person with whom I’ve had any interaction, I want to make sure I leave them with a favorable opinion.
Once I got to the security screening line and I was getting everything in its place, I realized something was amiss, or rather, something was missing. Somehow between my house and the airport, my cell phone went missing. The bottom fell out in my stomach, not because I’m attached to my cell phone, but because I was going to the other side of the country and I had no way of getting in touch with the people who were meeting me at the airport in California. I didn’t even have their number with me now –– in high school this wouldn’t have been a problem; we had to remember numbers back then.
Before I boarded the plane, I thought to try to call my phone, maybe somebody would hear it and pick it up. Pay phones are now vestiges of our bygone analog society, still I was able to track down one near my gate. No coins. I picked up the receiver and made a collect call. I felt like I was in high school.
Nobody answered, so I headed out West hoping my friends would pick me up and stick to the original plan, which is also something you had to do in high school. You made plans –– plans that didn’t change because you had no way of telling anybody the plan had changed. You set a time and a place to meet, and that was it: I’ll meet you at this dude’s house at 7 p.m.; I’ll meet you at the convenience store where they don’t mind selling wine coolers to underage kids at 9 p.m.
Fortunately, my friends were there at the airport. While I was out there, they worked during the day and I was on my own for the afternoons. I wrote my friends’ numbers down in case I needed to get ahold of them; I took some quarters in case I needed to use a pay phone. Every morning, we set a time and a place to meet after they got off work –– everybody knew to stick to the plan. When we went out in the evenings, we would determine a place to meet if we got separated. High school, high school, high school.
When I got back, my phone was waiting for me; it fell out of my pocket in the cab ride and the driver returned it after calling a few of my contacts. I tried to get a hold of him to thank him, but he didn’t call me back after I left my number with the dispatch.
This thankless act also made me think about high school, when sometimes you just had to surrender to the kindness of complete strangers, like the old man outside the liquor store who would buy us wine coolers, no questions asked.