Midnight Mutterings | The Boys

||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS by JACKIE BATES |||

I’m drifting back several decades to when my son Jay was in high school. We had moved to Seattle just in time for him to start high school. Everything was new that fall. New city, new house, new job. All new. Exciting and not just a little scary for our little family included Jay’s younger sister and a couple of cats. Jenny was a beautiful polydactyl Calico kitty we had brought from California four years earlier when she was a kitten and Angeline was a black Manx unmarried mother cat, a gift from friends across the Cascade Mountains in Central Washington.

But this story is about Jay, who had already moved too many times in his young life, coming into independence, learning to drive, getting a first job at Baskin-Robbins and walking into a big city school where he knew no one. Luckily, it all worked out for him because he found a new friend, Adam, who was a lot like him. (I have changed the boys’ names here in a vain effort to protect their privacy, though the cats’ names are real.)

In those years when Jay and Adam were in high school, they did everything together in addition to going to school. Adam’s family was more monied than ours, and Adam had all the new tech toys: an Apple II with printer, a VCR and some other home video games whose names I have forgotten. And they had dogs. Adam’s house was not far from ours and when the boys weren’t at our house they were at his.

Jay and Alan had a lot of fun and they were a fun for me and for Jay’s sister. I have heard so many heartbreaking stories about the perils of raising teenagers, especially teen age boys, but I was so lucky. If my boys got into trouble, they were so discreet about it I never knew a thing. They were smart enough that they did well in school without much obvious effort and were allowed to do some of their classes as independent study, sometimes together. When they were at my house, they were constantly amusing, given their outrageous senses of humor. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much in my life as I did during Jay’s high school years.

And they were kind and generous to me. For example, on my fortieth birthday, we repaired to Adam’s basement where they presented me with a ‘Pythonathon’ (hours of Monty Python TV shows the boys had copied with Adam’s VCR). It was a perfect birthday gift.

Jay and Adam went off to a couple of colleges together, the second of which was Evergreen in Olympia, when I got to see a bit more of them. There they both met young women who became their long term partners and the boys lost contact with each other for many years.

Recently, they reconnected and earlier in the summer, Jay visited Adam and his family in Idaho and then last weekend Adam came to Washington. After a night in Bellingham with Jay and the Cat Sisters, they all (cats too) came to Orcas for two nights with me. I hadn’t seen Adam in decades, and I can’t tell you how lovely it was to have him in my house again. Adam had always felt like a son to me and he and Jay were just like they were in high school: interesting, nice and very, very funny. We cooked together and laughed and caught up on politics and what our separate lives have been like in the decades since we had been in the same room together. I can’t express how great it was to have a couple of days with my boys again. My sixty year old boys.