Fifty Years and Five Miles…

 

That’s my fraternity brother from college, Jon Ayres.

I’m standing, he’s sitting, 1968 and yesterday. In the first picture, I was pinching Jon's right nipple. He agreed to the new shot if I promised to drop the nipple squeezing.

We had just finished dinner with our families at the new St Augustine Fish camp.

That restaurant is only about a ten-minute drive for each of us, but it took fifty-one years to get there.

Synchronicity and Kevin Bacon…six degrees removed all that time.

Jon was one of the guys I just couldn’t locate when working with other alumni friends to put together a college reunion in 2009.

Turns out he was right here in town.

Jon’s son, Jay, along with his beautiful wife, Stephanie, stopped by my house a month ago to pick up business supplies that I was holding for Hannah. Hannah and Stephanie are best friends, both on the same team with doTERRA, an essential oils MLM. Sometimes the company sends Hannah’s stuff to me by mistake. Hannah lives in Hawaii, so she asked Stephanie to swing by and pick the things up and use them herself.

Both are yoga girls, teachers, and advocates.

I knew Stephanie was a good friend of Hannah’s but had no clue that her handsome driver/husband, was my old buddy’s son.

The only neighbors I ever really speak with on our street, are David and Pura. It turns out that they have known and worked with both Jon and his wife, Connie, for years at Cap’s On The Water and the Kingfish Grill.

Then recently, I saw a reference to a “Jon Ayres” on David’s Facebook page.

I run into David frequently on dog walks. Me with my little black yappers dancing frantically on the end of their strings, David with his three-legged big guy, one of them always wearing a headset and carrying a mug of coffee. (David, not tripod.)

Me: “I saw on your Facebook, a reference to your friend, John Ayers. I knew a Jon Ayres back in college, But I guess it couldn't be the same guy, you and your friends are 30 years younger.”

David: “No, he’s an older guy, probably your age.”

Me: “We used to call him “Foggy”, because he was so mellow and laid back.”

David: “That’s got to be him!”

Synchronicity started kicking into overdrive. One thing led to another.

It turns out that Jon and I both got drafted right out of college. He hustled over to the National Guard, hoping to avoid being cannon fodder for the Army in Vietnam, learning how to drive tanks right here in the States. I did the same with the Air force. Computer operations in the Pentagon. We both dodged a very unpleasant bullet, neither of us wanting to go halfway round the world to shoot at people we didn’t know or have any grudge with. Especially knowing they were well-skilled at shooting back.

Same thing with our first marriages. Dodged a bullet. Married for five minutes to the wrong people the first time around, then long terms second marriages.

Two budding hippy kids from New Jersey who wound up together enrolled at a tiny Methodist college in North Alabama during the social upheaval of the late 1960’s.

That’s another long and winding road right there.

Both of us old guys recently had our first grandchild, little boys. Jon and I will be eighty when those kids are ten.

We’re introverts who seem to agree on almost everything, including a passionate distaste for zealotry in politics and religion.

His wife Connie is youthful, bright, and beautiful. So is Carla.

After all the old memories… “remember when we… that guy who…the teacher that…” Did the college cafeteria really boil the steaks on steak Wednesdays? They looked like the curled hands of drowning victims who had floated in a warm pond way too long. What was the name of that pizza place we used to go to in the middle of the night? You know, where the graveyard workers from Sweet Sue Kitchens would flood in on break from their chicken plucking duties? The college kids and the chicken puckers sat and stared at each other, assuming that the group on the opposite side of the room must have just landed in a spaceship from Mars.

But after all that nostalgia, after the meeting of the families, young and old, we had a wonderful dinner by the water, here in our mutual hometown.

That’s where we started a brand-new chapter.

No longer simply “old college friends”, but new old friends, looking forward to our next multi-generational get-together…one that spans so many layers of connection.

I’m sure Kevin Bacon is in there somewhere…

hmh