Friends.

Since Covid covered New York six-and-a-half years ago, and my wife and I packed a bag each (and two or three bags for our eight-year-old golden retriever, Whiskey) we have turned our ramshackle pile of seaside boards scattered willy-nilly along the rocky Gingham Coast into our primary residence. If you can call this living.

 My 1966 Simca 1500. Purrs like a kitten. A dead one.

Much of the primary-ness was done for tax reasons. We spend fewer than one-day-in-five in the Big Rat-Hole and we saved a number of thousands in state and local by making our Connecticut-ness official. Even my 1966 Simca 1500 with 424,000+ miles on it, has shed its New York plating and switched to Connecticut tags. To me, that was a St. Sebastian- like set of cuts. I felt like my pith and core were removed all for the sake of a few thousand dollars in insurance savings. Selling your soul can save you 15-percent.

Nice abs.

During the six-and-a-half years of our seaside sojourn, and primarily due to the general geniality of L, my wife, even I have made friends up here.

I am not one who makes friends often or easily. In fact, because I regard human-relationships as so fragile and unreliable, I don’t even put people’s names in my phone contacts until I have spoken to them at least one-hundred times. Many friendships in our overly-pollinated era come and go too easily for my taste. They grow stale then moldy like bread served in the former Ogilvy cafeteria, the Botulism Café.

That said, I have a somewhat of a coterie of friends up here. Mostly a group of dog dads who gather most evenings in Tom’s fenced-in greensward. There, while the men talk about sports and various aches and pains, and the dogs cavort and dig in the hydrangeas, and the wives sip Prosecco, we enjoy an easy camaraderie of the sort I have rarely experienced.

Once about six years ago I was talking to my wife about a New York friend group I am in—the JCrew. It’s me and five or six other 60-ish ad people. We get together every other month or so, usually for some really good Chinese food, and mostly let each other know there are like-minded people out there. I said to my wife, “Outside of teenage baseball teams and the JCrew, I’ve never willingly joined anything in my life.”

L looked at me, scanned me up and down, took in my free-floating slovenliness and said something like “no wonder,” as she fled the room and went to the garage to inhale carbon monoxide direct from the tail-pipe of my Simca.

The little woman recovering from monoxide poisoning in
the lush back seat of the Simca.

All that said, last night we went out to dinner with some new friends who live less than 400 feet down the coast from us, Dr. and Mrs. Y. The Ys are roughly our age, with kids roughly the age of our kids and the accompanying Normandy-invasion of grandchildren roughly the age of our grandkids.

In more care-free times, we’d pile the kids in the trunk and hit the open road.

We went to an upscale town about ten miles up the Connecticut River called Chester and to an upscale restaurant—one of approximately 88 restaurants in thse environs called “The River Cafe.”

If “We Try Harder,” was the slogan of the Sixties, “We Don’t Give a Hoot,” is the slogan of today.

The restaurant is beautiful and pretentious but not quite pretentious enough to give you acid-reflux. That’s what the food’s for. The 21-year-old unshaven and short-pant-wearing waiter duly introduced himself.

“Hi, I’ll be serving you tonight. I’m Sebastian and we’re out of the duck confit and the spicy Thai style charred local beef salad.” If you’re out of it, I thought, it can’t be all that local.

Before too long he steered the table toward the more expensive of the wine choices and took our dinner orders. I got the tagliarini with a beef ragout, in part because it was the only thing on the menu under $36. Innocently, I asked, “Could you bring us some bread?”

“We’re all out of bread,” he answered as if that were acceptable.

Chester is a one-street town and on Sunday’s that one street is taken over by a farmers' market. 

Where they sell bread.

A lot of bread.

But the restaurant, which is central to the one-street had no bread.

It’s hard for me as an old and getting-older man to understand the complacency of a restaurant “running out of bread.”

It seems symbolic of so much of the world today. Things that should be givens are no longer within the realm of possibility. Did you seriously think you’d be doing self-checkout in the grocery store, not have your own desk in the office and be told every 22 feet that you’re “family”? Did you seriously think you could drive one-hundred miles on a major highway and never see a cop? While you can’t walk one-hundred feet in an airport without seeing soldiers carrying machine guns.

My mother’s motto: Close cover before striking.

When I was twenty, I worked as a cashier at a big Rush St. Chicago liquor store called Bragnos’. Behind me behind the counter we kept minatures and pints, those small bottles the neighborhood parking lot attendants would turn to to get them through the night. We also sold cigarettes.

One evening a distinguished-looking man came in and in addition to his daily booze, he asked for a pack of Winstons.

I scanned the shelves. None.

I looked around for Lorenzo Jeffries, the stock man. He had gone for the night.

“We’re all out of Winstons,” I answered.

The distinguished-looking man stared me down.

“Winston’s are the second largest-selling cigarette in America,” he informed me. “You should never be out of them.”

That was a life lesson and a marketing lesson I never forgot.

So much has changed in the world.

Mostly that it’s now every person for themselves and no one gives a shit about anyone but themselves.

It’s been said you divide the world in two. People who believe and live in WITT: We’re In This Together. And people who believe and live in YOYO: You’re On Your Own.

We are clearly alone, stranded on an ice-floe of absolute alienation.

All I wanted was a slice of bread.