You can’t go home again

But if you drink nine pints of stout, you won’t really notice.

We closed the 4P’s last night (it’s always and forever the 4Ps, no matter what the sign out front says) – half of a dozen of us, in the old style, knocking down pint after pint and fortifying ourselves on THE GREATEST POTATO SOUP ANYWHERE and roaring along in actually pretty good harmony. We sang the old rebel songs with our own modifications, and when the band didn’t play them, we put them on the jukebox and belted them out. I may or may not have stood on the table for “Sweet Home Alabama” despite the fact that it’s not particularly MY sweet home…all we lacked was the Chernobyl cloud of pipe smoke overhead, which you don’t get in any bar in DC anymore.

I haven’t been back to Arlington, and I may not get there, and that would be fine – so many times, trips like this take on the feel of visiting the place where they shot a movie you saw long ago. Even now, everything feels slightly unreal – even the old route home down Rock Creek Parkway and onto 66 felt familiar, but it’s not like I was never gone. Tyson’s Corner was almost unrecognizable, even inside the mall once I oriented myself. Names, places, things that I remember on the periphery of my consciousness – stuff that I’m sure was critical once, problem users and implacable foes and girls who walked out of the cafeteria line like it was a runway show – so much of it barely rings a bell anymore.

We’re old. We’re none of us getting younger, and the other five guys around the table last night represented twelve kids back home (ten of them girls – you don’t think God has a wicked sense of humor, think again). For many of them, it was the first trip to the 4Ps since the old days – or at least since we were last in town in 2007. We couldn’t do this on the regular anymore even if we wanted to – it’s damn near impossible to synchronize babysitting and then throw down the cash (and the bill last night wasn’t a patch on the old days, when we routinely pushed the upper edge of three figures because there were so many of us staying so late.) Even if I’d stayed around, this kind of thing wouldn’t have continued steadily on – maybe my birthday every year, with a little luck, but making it once a month? Not a chance. One person can’t make it, then another, then maybe you feel like you’re in a rut anyway. One guy moves, another gets married, there are kids now, you get out of the habit, and before you know it, it’s been years and years. In fact, when I first walked in and sat down, and looked around at the changes in the menu, and the decor, and the staff, and the jukebox, I had a creeping sense of dread and sadness – that it wouldn’t be the same, that it couldn’t be the same, and that it would only be depressing in the end.

But it wasn’t. It was glorious. It was enough to be able to reach back and touch that part of who I was again – and a great comfort and relief to know it’s still there. Here we go again, we’re on the road again, we’re on the road again, we’re on our way to paradise…

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