CHELAN — Greetings from the exotic faraway land of Chelan, about 45 minutes from my home, where me and a bunch of old college pals have gathered for our annual mini-reunion in a weirdly vertical 12-story house full of hidden rooms. It has 19 staircases, 47 bathrooms, five decks and 13 patios. Yesterday I went looking for a towel and ended up having to call someone to find me.
This house is a robot and you have to ask it to turn on lights, open doors, change the temperature, start the oven, scoot your chair up or hand you a Kleenex. The owner, my freshman-year roomie, is in a constant fight with the house. They argue nonstop. I mean you should hear the way they talk to each other.
I’ve planted myself in a chair closest to the food and will not leave out of fear of never being heard from again. I’m trying to stay on good terms with the house.
These people will never know they made it into the Methow Valley News.
My chair is posited around a large table where we sit and hash out the same stories we re-tell every year, but each time new twists emerge and someone, usually me, pops up with “I don’t remember that” and someone else says “Oh you were there” and no one knows or cares if it’s true. It doesn’t matter because in a few minutes we won’t recall any of it. This goes on indefinitely between episodes of cooking and eating and drinking and planning the next meal. Food is a main topic of conversation and someone keeps handing out bizarrely named cocktails.
We boast about the rules we broke and petty crimes we committed and amaze ourselves at having stayed alive this long. One night we did a Zoom with the people who couldn’t make it in person. Some colliding yet overlapping worlds there, overall probably a success but after about an hour someone on the Zoom expressed excitement over a planned trip to Washington DC next year to “see the ballroom.”
That prompted some frantic sidebar “please shut this down now” texts and eventually we made it out of that cyber room intact. Due to a reluctantly agreed upon new policy invoked by one killjoy called “be like Dolly” we have not been allowed to talk trash about each other, but no one ruled out outing each other’s deepest darkest secrets from those long-ago times that we all blindly accept as possible truths.
We are halfway through the week. One guy is reading aloud excerpts from “On the Road” because we are that old while someone else is telling a story embedded within a story that branched off from a story that began with a story woven from an original seven-pronged story. One is staring wide-eyed at us all as if trying to remember which of her many friend groups we are, and another is multi-tasking by telephonically working through a plumbing problem at his house while mixing drinks, tracking the New York bagels he’s expecting and artfully tossing frequent, wildly appreciated inappropriate remarks into the air. It feels like home.
Amid all this chaos I’m trying to type on a deadline while wondering if back home the dog has been sleeping on my bed despite the “no dogs” sign I posted on the bedroom door, down low where there’s no way he could miss it. Meanwhile, three people are in the kitchen right now discussing avocados, two others are arguing over which one of us always blasted Steely Dan throughout the dorm, and now there are four people in the kitchen talking about avocados.
As usual I’m the only one who stays out of the kitchen and just waits for people to bring me plates of food. I’m also the only one who didn’t arrive with gifts for everyone else. Clearly I have no social skills other than sitting near food looking waif-like. So far it’s been working.
