...all together around the table on this temperate spring evening, one dog sprawled and deeply asleep on the couch between my sister and Debby, the little dog at my sister's feet, keeping her toes warm, his nose in the basket that is the woven strap of her shoes.
"I'm not getting up," my sister says. There's just a thumbnail of Manhattan left in her cocktail glass. "You can go get me a brownie if you want."
"Can I?" I ask.
"Actually, I need to pee," she says. "Sorry, dogs." The dogs look slightly aggrieved as she gets up, but neither makes any effort to find another place to sleep.
The day has been just long enough, the night just dark enough. Alex, our graduate and guest of honor, is a particular type of quiet tonight. He's not much of a talker around let's call us adults, but in this instance he's present, checking his phone only intermittently for something better to do, rather than checking out completely via some game or SnapChat or whatever technology occupies the mindspace of a young adult these days.
I don't feel old, and yesterday at his high school graduation (which was also my high school, many years ago), I could certainly see that I am no longer his age, that those faces are fresh and their world still new, but I can also still remember walking into a tent (maybe that exact tent?) on the same well-kept playing field near what was then simply called the middle school and is now West Campus. I remember from that day a feeling of momentousness, and a thrill but also a hollowness when it was over, of something emptied and not yet filled. How am I almost 41? What path did I take to get here? Would I be here on this day no matter the route I took? Are regrets just ghosts we refuse to allow to rest? ("Haunt me," we tell them. "Who would I be without you?")
Nuria insists that we all do a shot of tequila. "Arriba, abajo, al centro, pa' dentro," she intones.
A strange disorientation persists, as though some part of me has fallen back 23 years and is demanding a reckoning. "You had your whole life in front of you," he--I--says to that long ago me, and is it I or he who responds, "Perhaps I had something to learn."