Casual

Although we cannot live backwards in time, Benjamin Button notwithstanding, I do feel a certain nostalgia for lost qualities of life.  Some of this came back to me in viewing an obscure Netflix video about life in an urban Swedish commune in the 1970s, and the sense is even stronger in L'Auberge Espanol, about twentysomethings thrown together as tenants in a Barcelona flat.  In the latter case, 'thrown together' is not quite accurate.  There is a roommate vetting process, which is both elaborate and exhausting to watch.  It's just that at that age, the 20s, everything seems thrown together.  No matter how much care one takes in analyzing a roommate for compatibility, the results are bound to be mixed.  There's a lack of life experience, which adds up to an experience of life that, at this point, I miss.  Or I think I do.

Take the day in London, 1972 or thereabouts, when I wandered out of Victoria Station on the way to my somewhat laughable job with the Maharishi in Pimlico.  Someone said hello, someone American, and if I recognized her at all, it was just barely.  She was the girlfriend of a Chilean graduate student, Edgardo, I knew from Berkeley.  I also knew Edgardo's wife and his son, Edgardo Chico, age 5, and being something of an adopted family member and rather fond of the group of them, I hadn't quite accepted this girl.  For one thing, she was extremely young.  If I was 24, she was maybe 19.  

Edgardo, being an old man of 28 or so, seemed poorly matched with this one.  But matched he was.  After I had emerged from six months in the hospital in Los Angeles, Edgardo's new arrangement became part of my new life.  I liked the old arrangement better, with the petite and charming wife and the rambunctious five-year-old.  But there they were, in some Berkeley room, living together and serving me a peculiarly Chilean dinner of Edgardo's, not the American girlfriend's, concoction: steak tartare.  Like everything else in this narrative, a hard-to-acquire taste.

Because we were all Americans, sort of, encountering each other on foreign soil, kind of, the natural thing was to get together.  And the first thing I knew there we were, all three of us, in some bed sitting room Edgardo and the girl shared in some part of fairly central London.  And damned if dinner didn't consist of what must have been Edgardo's absolute favorite centerpiece, steak tartare.  I recall this encounter in spotty detail.  How cramped things were, London being what it is and was.  And how dinner and its preparation was discussed.  The American girl whose name I simply can't recall, explained that she had carefully shopped for the right sort of mince, a.k.a., hamburger.  

This was meant to assure me, but nothing did.  Particularly, not the addition of chopped onions and raw egg.  I'm rather partial to onions, but not in this context.  Even then, the whole thing seemed like a petri dish, an invitation to bacterial doom.  In addition, I had flirted on and off, owing to my involvement with the Maharishi and his ilk, with macrobiotic and related diets.  But I'm sure I made my way through the steak tartare, and the evening.  And all I really want to know now is what happened to Edgardo.  Allende hadn't been toppled yet by the CIA.  Edgardo's fondness for left-wing political theater wouldn't get him in trouble for another year or so.  The mystery echoes across the decades.

In retrospect, Edgardo may have been stuck in the freedom of twentysomethings too long.  For that's what it was, the tendency to drop everything and get together casually, spur of the moment.  After all, this is a splendid idea.  Today, my friends Clint and Phyllis, slightly older than I, keep the tradition alive.  Dinner happens off the cuff, friends invited in at the last Palo Alto minute.  And why not?  You don't have to do this sort of thing all the time or with people you don't like.  And by the time you're in your 60s and 70s, like Clint and Phyllis, you know who you like.

I was wandering toward the Holland Park tube station one day when I spotted an American in the distance.  And this is the only remarkable thing about the 1970s London anecdote.  That by then, after a couple of years in Britain, I could spot an American.  What was it?  Well, doubtless the clothes.  One thing about the London of that era, and perhaps this era too, is that one could not dart out for a bottle of milk without paying some attention to attire.  And even I got in the swing of what attire meant in early-70s London.  Ralph, and that was the name of the American standing by the tube station, might have worn a shirt or something that suggested the States.  But what I really recall was the body language.  

This derived in part from the size of the body, for Americans of our generation were generally quite taller than Brits, a decade of postwar rationing having taken its toll on the growth of UK kids.  But the absolute distinctive thing was the way he moved, the way he surveyed his surroundings.  Dammit, he was American.  He was an American tourist emerging from the tube and surveying the land with the-world-is-my-oyster moves and gestures that distinguished my countrymen of that era.

That Ralph turned out to be Ralph, was an utter surprise.  In fact, he may have recognized me first.  London was full of Americans, and just another one didn't matter.  In any case, one of us a spotted the other, there were words of amazement at how we both could be so far from our University of California Riverside roots.  Naturally, we got together.  Getting together meant going back to my bedsit, which on that particular afternoon I was sharing with Diane.  My playful next-door neighbor happened to be playing with me those days.  The days did not last long, but she was around, and everyone got their tea.  Until Ralph and his wife, and yes, he had one, got the idea that Diane was sitting so close to me on the bedsit's lone cot for a reason.  I didn't mind how things were going, how the afternoon was trending.  Diana was much more novel than Ralph.  He scooted away with his wife after a fairly short hour.  We would have to keep in touch.  We hadn't been in touch before, and we haven't since.

Still, it was an era of throwing open doors, of casual socializing, and much of this I miss.  Clint and Phyllis keep the principle going, because they have the discernment and years to know who they want around.  We have all emerged from years of career and families to find ourselves at another stage of things, a time of life when we can reopen some of the social doors we've shut.  I wouldn't want to be 20 again.  I wouldn't want to live in a London bedsit.  But I must've learned a thing or two along the way.  And my door...well, it's not entirely shut.