A tiny bluetooth speaker, not much bigger than a stack of poker chips, churned out big, sentimental sounds — including the falsetto voice of Andy Gibb.
On cue, five women — who were in high school with me when Gibb was topping charts with songs like “I Just Want to Be Your Everything” — belted out the lyrics and took control of the song. Gibb hardly mattered anymore.
“I’d do anything to be your e-very-thing.”
Their singing accompanied our game of Yahtzee around a thick wooden table Saturday evening in a cabin high above Blue Ridge, Georgia. It was the last night of a brief summer gathering. Among the friends who could make it this year, I am the last one still living in Hopkinsville.
I am not a singer. But I try to be a good listener — and I can report that their voices were exactly as I remember them more than 40 years ago on ballgame road trips.
Spontaneous, boisterous and always a little mischievous.
I cannot tell you how well they carry a tune in their 60s. I’m too invested. Too biased in their favor.
Listening to my friends sing songs memorized before any of us knew adult hardships (difficult jobs, family strife, illness, divorce and death) and achievements (career highs, travel, marriage, children and grandchildren), I was struck by the contrast between our lives then and now. So much has changed, and so much hasn’t.
Even the room held clues.
We played a dice game invented in the 1950s, ate vanilla ice cream with warm brownies and tried to conjure up nearly forgotten classmates.
Technology we never could have imagined in the 1970s was all around us. Wifi in a place so remote we wondered if the bears would crawl into the yard when we least expected it. Cellphones that held thousands of family photos. A flatscreen TV bigger than the windshield on my Toyota. And the food — gluten-free galore, collagen powder supplements, bread boasting of 21 grains and seeds, Stevia, hot honey-flavored hummus, a charcuterie board and coffee brewed one cup at a time from plastic Keurig pods.
Someone came with a bottle of wine commemorating the 50th anniversary of the movie “Jaws.” Here’s a reality check: If you remember seeing that movie in a theater, you will soon become eligible for Medicare to pay for your new knees or hips (or you already have).
Maybe you’ve heard that you can’t make old friends. Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers said so in a song. There’s something to this.
Many people will reach an age when they want to go back and find old friends. If you are lucky, they are not lost. Maybe just waiting.
And if they can sing for you, that’s a bonus.
Note: Gratitude to Anne Lawson, Beth Barton, Amy Barton, Nicki Durbin and Cathy Croft for demonstrating why reconnecting can feel like therapy and for letting me write about our gathering. (I’ve identified them by their original names because it seems right on a weekend when we were time-travelers.)
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. Brown was a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era, where she worked for 30 years. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board past president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. She serves on the Hopkinsville History Foundation's board.
