Minority group gathers for coffee

Sometimes I think I am in the 99th percentile.

I wonder if I’ve wandered into a minority group so small that anthropologists and sociologists and other wise guys might choose us for academic study.

The thought occurred to me at McDonald’s.

It was a Tuesday morning. On Tuesdays, a few of us tend to gather for that extra cup of coffee that we really don’t need.

That particular Tuesday, one of the regular attendees was out of town. But we had a more than worthy substitute: A fellow classmate from 1966 was back in Indiana to visit his father, who is now well into his 90s.

So, the three of us gathered around one of those high tables that never seem to be quite the right height to drink our unnecessary coffee, catch up, tell a few lies (or at least exaggerate a bit) and enjoy our time away from more pressing matters.

As the conversation rambled on — going down this rabbit hole and around that corner to a cul de sac — it became apparent that the three of us represented a minority group and a tiny one at that.

There were, to be sure, differences among us. While one guy’s father was still alive, neither of the other two still had living parents. And while my friend’s father was in his 90s, my dad had died 35 years ago come March. That’s a huge difference.

But there were also similarities, significant ones.

We were about the same age. No surprise there.

But all three of us had “married for life.” 

One had been married for 50 years. Connie and I will mark 47 years in June, while the other guy drinking coffee will celebrate 45 years with his bride this summer.

In a climate where divorce has become endemic, where it’s not unusual for more divorces to be recorded than weddings, that struck us all as a little out of the ordinary. 

That’s particularly true for those of us who reached maturity (or something that could pass as maturity) in the 1960s and early 1970s, an era when divorce rates started skyrocketing.

So, we figured, we had been lucky. And our spouses had been patient.

But we kept on talking, and our minority group kept narrowing.

All of us, it seemed, lived in old houses. And all of us had lived in those houses a long, long time.

Given the fact that Americans move around the map constantly, our sense of being planted in one place was a little unusual. One guy said they’d been in their house since the 1970s, and another said it had been the late 1980s. Connie and I have been in our house since 1981.

So, is it just inertia?

Were we just too lazy or too unimaginative to move? Maybe.

But one thing was clear: The number of couples who have been married 40 to 50 years and have lived in the same house for 35 to 45 years makes for a very small list.

We kept on talking, this time about our kids and about our own behavior as 70 keeps creeping up on us.

While we all knew that we should be downsizing, none of us were.

I confessed that we’d bought three paintings in 2017. As if that were not enough, we also bought a couple of pieces of furniture.

(Furniture? When you’re approaching 70? What kind of plan is that? Are you just trying to make things more difficult for your children after you’ve gone?)

And then another guy at the table admitted that he was in the midst of a major remodeling project, a project so ambitious that nothing about it was rational.

Finally, the out-of-towner weighed in, confessing that he and his wife possessed 35 — thirty-five! — oriental carpets. Most of them are rolled up in the attic. But, just the same, 35?

By then the coffee had grown cold, and we suspected the other folks at McDonald’s were giving us the stink-eye.

After all, there we were — married forever, living in our houses forever and behaving as if we’d live forever. 

If that’s not a minority group, I don’t know what is.