2 am

Three days to go before I board an early bus to Dulles, give or take. I’m an early to rise kind of guy. It’s pretty selfish, really. I love the early morning because it’s quiet - a chance to set my day and get ahead of the curve. Being the end of summer means I’m sleeping in - not getting out of bed until six. Of course, like Daylight Saving Time, I don’t get any extra day by rising early. The downside to being up at 6 means that my day usually ends at 10pm. With a 13 hour time change just 5 days away, and a full week planned out I figured it couldn’t hurt to get a jump start on my jet lag. So here I am, the third day moving my evenings later, at 1:15am. With luck I’ll sleep until at least 8 or 9 - checking off a couple of time zones in the process. It seems like as good a time as any to talk about how the hell this whole adventure came about.

It’s March of this year. Nothing interesting happens in March. Oh, sure - the crocus are blooming and the thermometer is touching 60 during the day. It’s not really spring, of course. It will be two months before the frost free date and there will inevitably be two more snow storms between now and then. A small one any day that will remind us all that Winter will not cede the field so easily, and a paltry flurry event come the first week of April that will melt by afternoon. I’m still deciding which seedlings should go in my Jiffy starter pots. It’s an annual ritual that involves some herbs, jalapeno peppers, and tomatoes and the cycle is well rehearsed. I start the seeds, carefully transplant them into my garden, weed and water for three weeks, and then come back in June to find most of them dead. The ones which survive my abandonment will, inevitably, be eaten by deer or other wildlife before their fruits ripen or their leaves are ready for harvest.

As I sit pondering the plants I will kill, mindlessly scrolling social media, I realize I haven’t heard from Mike in a long time. Of course, I haven’t seen him in person since he left the country nearly 3 decades ago, but it’s rare a year goes by without some snarky comment on social media that lets the other know we’re still around. Even my most social media averse friends pop up from time to time - birthday, some memory or, more frequently of late, a parent passing. I jump to Facebook and look him up. Truly nothing recent. So I send him a message.

There’s a funny disconnect for people my age. We grew up without the internet and without cell phones. Everyone had a phone number to their house - a landline - and that never changed unless you moved. Even when we grew up and moved away our parents still had their number so you could always get in touch, and if you lost your list of numbers you just looked their parents up in the phone book. By the time we managed to acquire email accounts we were out of college, and even then it was mostly just work emails. No smart phones to catalog names and hide numbers. Heck, texting didn’t even exist before we set out into the world. People who left just disappeared unless their parents stayed put. When Facebook became popular, we Gen Xers joined that hip new platform the college students were using. And we reconnected. Fifteen, twenty years had gone by without a word and now we could peer into each other’s lives and see new families. But more than anything, it turned into a lifeline of communication for a generation who had lost touch.

I waited three days before I heard back from Mike. I was sitting at my home office desk, about 8:30 in the morning, seriously contemplating a second cup of coffee as a way to procrastinate the work on my desk. My phone announced I had a message and I swiped to unlock it. “Are you in the mood/have time to accept a drunk dial?” Well, that’s a far better excuse to avoid work than a second cup of coffee. It was like we hadn’t missed a day. We decided to cut off the call two hours later as it was pushing midnight for him - but not before hatching a plan to hang out in person. I could crash at his place for a few days in September when he’s slowest at work. He could show me around Tokyo and we’d have a grand time. Simple and straight forward, as all things in life are. Except…