The summer I was 21, I was living at home [Napoleon, OH: population 8,000 and high school graduating class of 152 for the uninitiated], working (kind of; that's a story for another day) and waiting for the fall to arrive and bring with it my first real full-time college teaching job at Eastern Michigan.
But mainly what my friends and I did that summer was sit out on our boat on the Maumee River, go to our play rehearsals for Hello, Dolly! at night, and follow it up with a trip to Napoleon's newest and nicest (and only, for the most part) bar: Rick's Sports Tavern, retitled "Rickety Rick's" almost immediately by my buddies and I.
We hit Rickety Rick's nearly every night of the week. We were some of the bar's best supporters in the early days, and knew nearly everyone who frequented the place. As the years rolled on, and we went our separate directions, we still hit up Rickety Rick's on Saturday nights, and it's a sure bet to see most of the people we went to high school with there on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.
Thus, I had concluded I was going to go there Saturday night, regardless of if any of my friends in town were interested in going with me.
My parents, the Hot Dog Man, and I headed over to BW3 in Defiance for some beers and trivia, and we spent maybe two and a half hours there, fumbling through trivia and eventually giving up and playing poker instead. It's weird that I spend enough time in bars that I go into "bar mode" regardless of the fact that I'm with my parents; I had to keep telling myself, "no, you can't go talk to those girls." But it was a great time, and we got home around midnight. I asked the Hot Dog Man if he wanted to grab a beer at Rick's and he said he was tired. So I headed out alone.
One thing about living in a small town is that your sense of distance gets totally warped. A drive downtown seemed like a bit of a haul, when we lived here, but I timed it and discovered it takes four minutes and 15 seconds to drive from my parents' house to Rick's. What a joke. I can't even get out of my neighbourhood in Tampa in four minutes.
I walk into Rick's and look around. I recognize no one. This falls in line with the article in the paper about a bad car accident near my parents' house that killed three people, ages 24-27, all from Napoleon, yet listing names I did not recognize. Everyone I knew here moved out and the replacements came from who-knows-where. They looked at me suspiciously, like I was infringing on their territory. I felt the same about them.
I was about to leave when this beautiful brunette comes through the door in a dress that is just slightly gaudy enough for me to recognize as a bridesmaid's dress. I look more closely and realize it's a girl I went to school with for eleven years and whom had always been a little strange toward me, for reasons I have never nor will ever understand. She was cute when we were in school, but she's grown to be a real stunner.
I almost didn't recognize her, but then I was like "LISA" and she was like "OMG TIM" and we decided to have a beer. I asked if the dude she was with was her husband; it was, and he introduced himself and those were the last words he said. Why all the cute girls from high school married quiet, gruff men I will never know.
So we talked for 20 minutes, catching up on who got married (one of her friends from high school, someone who was always much nicer to me than Lisa was) and who was at the wedding, what I'm doing, et cetera. The conversation was far longer than any conversation between the two of us previously in the 20 years I have known her. She and gruff husband left.
I went into the other room and realized two twin brothers that were in my high school class, collectively known as the Youngbuddies, were sipping bud lights and smoking cigarettes along the bar. I was not friends with these guys; they were well-known as drug dealers and punks. Truth be told, they're nice guys now, and I sat and talked with them about life, gossip, and how our hometown sucks now. We closed down the bar, pledged to see each other at our ten-year next summer, and I headed home on the frighteningly short drive. Napoleon used to be a "nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there." I'm not so sure it's even a nice place to visit anymore.
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