Bring Your Own

Seventh Grade Lunch Table, Redux.

This past Saturday Sam and I had friends over for a tradition begun the first summer of the pandemic, when the CDC warned against sharing food and gathering undistanced and unmasked indoors. We’d meet on decks and porches or around firepits in backyards to sit three careful feet away from each other. We’d BYO pizza and drinks and have a great time catching up.

After the vaccine and some measure of Covid fatigue, indoor gatherings resumed. While we were happy to be inside again, this being New England, we’ve maintained the original “bring your own” format.

So, Saturday, as we sat around the dining room table cheek by jowl, as my father liked to say, cheerfully swapping pizza slices, I experienced a wave of déjà vu. It took me several minutes to identify the original source: seventh grade at Sleeping Giant Middle School, the cafeteria table I shared with six book-smart but socially awkward kindred spirits, a gaggle of furious blushes and tinsel teeth and inside jokes, cracking each other up.

It took shutting my eyes and following a feeling to a time I felt similarly uncertain about life and similarly safe in the moment, to another time I could pull up a chair and feel everything slide into place.