Parties Past and Present

Twenty years ago, I was surrounded by friends and celebrating my birthday at the Jonesboro Storytelling Festival.

There's so much more to that memory than I posted at the time. I have a draft story saved somewhere entitled "Nobody Gets Laid at the Jonesboro Storytelling Festival". Last November I was at a backyard party where a professional storyteller who was actually from Jonesboro laughed when I told her about the premise. No one gets laid in Jonesboro ever, apparently. I'm not the only one - which is the lesson that the internet has taught me, over and over again. Nothing we do is ever truly unique, we're all in this together.

The backyard party where I met the storyteller was being hosted by a prominent local artist couple I've known for a long time. We're not close friends - I'm not sure how many people at my age have close friends. I know them, they know me, we're all cool with each other. That's kind of how it goes at forty-six. I know a lot of people, but there's no more of that intimacy we had in our twenties, where a bunch of us could sit on a couch and say we felt loved. Even the intimacy we think we have that might be unique isn't. I learned by accident at that artist's party that someone I had dated was now with someone one of the artists had once dated. There's no one-off anything, really.

The backyard artist's party last November was the first party anyone had been to since the quarantine. Since then, the husband and I have been to a few get togethers. There was one just last weekend, hosted by friends I've had since 1997. The husband went early in the day, and stayed until the evening when I came to pick him up.

I didn't go to the board game party all day like the husband because I was busy. The kids needed pick ups and drop offs at their different activities, and a friend from Florida came downtown to visit. The Florida friends are staying with family far north of Atlanta with their kids. We've all seen the sharks swimming down the Tampa area streets and the destruction of neighborhoods on TV. No one knows yet when schools in the hurricane area will resume. The kids can't go to cirtual school because there's no cell service towers or internet. Even if they did have online access, it will be weeks before there is drinkable water and restored roads in many areas.

So since the Florida friends will be around for a while we walked the two blocks down to the Beltline and showed the teens Ponce City Market, the old Sears building which is now a mall. It was the first time I've really seen the return of teen mall culture. For the majority of my daughter's lives, malls were semi-abandoned places we only visited occasionally to go to the movies. Of course, not all malls were like that over the last two decades, just the ones near us downtown and on the east side. But now there's a proper mall again, and my teens can walk to it, and younger daughter was thrilled to show her Florida friends around and run into her school friends. Next week is fall break for my girls, and I suspect all of them will be at the mall at least a few times, since they can walk.

I did go to the very end of the game night party that evening. It was at a house in East Point. I've been going to parties thrown by these friends since 1997, first in Murfreesboro, then in Nashville, and now here, for twenty-five years. As I sat around the bonfire, we all talked about random shit - the kids, and the floods, and the neighborhoods, and caught up. And we all agreed - it's 2022, the world is on fire, nobody knows anything, and we're all just doing our best.