Many of you, I’m sure, can understand why I needed to make this trip, even though it meant driving alone to Long Island on the worst travel weekend of the year.
You know how I feel.
You live here. You grew up somewhere else. Some of your dearest friends – particularly the childhood pals who, despite many miles of separation and too many years apart, remain as close as siblings – still live where you grew up.
And sometimes, even as we warmly embrace our sun-splashed lives on this seaside patch of paradise, we can’t help but feel we’re missing out on back-home moments and shared memories being made without us.
So when my lifelong buddy called and told me the guys were getting together for an informal reunion on the Friday night after Thanksgiving, I had to find a way be there.
It had been seven years since we all saw each other at a 50th birthday bash. Before that? I’m not sure, exactly, but I’m thinking it was in the 1990s.
Clearly, way too much time was passing between these always-fun, never-awkward reunions – especially for me. While I went away to college and spent the vast majority of my adult life in Florida, most of the other guys stayed close to home and still live within 30 minutes of our old neighborhood.
They would see each other regularly throughout the years, getting together for birthdays, summer cookouts and their kids’ graduations and weddings. They’d dutifully show up for parents’ funerals.
When possible, I tried to be there. Usually, though, making such a trip wasn’t financially or logistically practical.
This time, it was different.
The Thanksgiving weekend has long held special significance for our gang, a close-knit group of former high school athletes who, for 20 years, gathered at a local field on Thursday morning to play a “Turkey Bowl” football game.
We started in 1976 – the first Thanksgiving after our high school graduation – and continued through 1995, playing in cold and wind, rain and sleet, and sometimes snow.
We’d split into two teams and play for a couple of hours, breaking for a halftime beer and making sure the often-high-scoring games ended in time for everyone to join their families for their turkey dinners. Most years, we’d meet again for drinks on Friday and Saturday night.
In the early years, those of us away at college would come home for the holiday and play. Later, when I was living in Florida in the 1980s and ’90s, I would leave work early on Wednesday and drive all night to get “home” for the game, arriving at the field shortly before kickoff.
To this day, some of my fondest memories are tied of those Rockwellian Thanksgiving mornings in the town where I grew up. It’s a shame, really, that our annual tradition came to an end.
But it did.
After two decades, as we reached our late 30s in age, we were too old to continue playing tackle football with no helmets or pads – we couldn’t risk getting injured and missing work – and too hard-headed to switch to two-hand touch.
We did, however, celebrate the end of our glory days with a party on the Saturday following our final game. Somewhere, one of the guys has years of “Turkey Bowl” footage filmed by his father. I still have the commemorative T-shirt.
But Thanksgiving hasn’t been the same since.
These past 20 years, I’ve spent most of my Thanksgiving mornings on a tennis court, playing a different game with new friends, some of whom now mean as much to me as the guys I grew up with.
But it’s not the same.
Without diminishing in any way my friendships here – honestly, I consider my Vero Beach buddies to be brothers, too – there’s something different about the friendships of our youth.
There’s more history, more nostalgia, more innocence. That doesn’t make them better, necessarily, but when they fiercely endure through all of life’s twists and turns, they offer a comfort rarely found outside of family.
That’s why I felt so compelled to be there Friday night, when my boyhood buddies gathered at a Long Island ale house.
It wasn’t easy getting there on Thanksgiving weekend with only a month’s notice, which made it impossible for me to find an affordable flight and for my wife to rearrange her work schedule to join me.
I seriously thought about passing, about waiting for the next one, about missing out again. But my buddies and I have now entered our late 50s, and while 60 might be the new 40, there are no guarantees. I didn’t want our next reunion to be at a funeral.
So with my boss’ blessing and my wife’s encouragement, I gassed up my car and hit the road last Wednesday, stopping to spend Thanksgiving Day with my sisters in Virginia, then driving the rest of the way on Friday.
It was, as I had hoped, the right decision – something that became obvious immediately upon seeing my buddies, only one of whom knew I was coming up.
After a series of heartfelt handshakes and hugs, we first caught up on each other’s lives, covering everything from health and homes to jobs and kids. We pondered our plans for the future. We also shared news about other former classmates and friends from the neighborhood.
As expected, we picked up right where we left off the last time we were together. As usual, we drank beer and reminisced about our past mischief, retelling the same stories we’ve been telling for years and relishing another chance to relive the adventures of our youth.
As always, the night flew by much too quickly.
The next afternoon, however, four of us met at a local park to play – no, not football – tennis. For two hours, in a steady drizzle, on a puddle-covered court.
“This is great,” one of my buddies said on almost every changeover. “I can’t believe we’ve never done this before.”
I can’t believe, as close as we are and as much as we enjoy these reunions, that we haven’t all gotten together more often. But that might change.
There was plenty of talk at the ale house about making this post-Thanksgiving reunion an annual affair. Someone even mentioned resurrecting the Turkey Bowl, which began 40 years ago with no real expectations of becoming a holiday tradition and ended 20 years ago with a party.
“If we’re going to play,” one of us said, “we’re playing touch.”
So we’re not just getting older – chronologically, anyway – we’re getting wiser. And all these years later, we’re still getting closer.
Many of you, I’m sure, can understand how that can happen, even though we’re here and they’re there and we don’t see them as much as we’d like.
You know how it feels.
You know why I drove to Long Island on the worst travel weekend of the year.
