Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of female writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you’ll find here each week, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation.
I was 19 when I moved to Middle Tennessee about 10 years ago. My husband — then my boyfriend — and I soon realized just how lonely being in a new place could be. I had made a couple friends at my grocery store job, but one of the closest friends I’d found was a man much older than me.
Dan was about 70 when we first met. He was a Yankee by way of Pittsburgh who wore suspenders and brightly colored collared shirts. I met Dan while working at the grocery store: He was a regular at the customer service desk, either lodging complaints or stopping by to chitchat with whoever happened to be standing there at that moment. Dan’s wife, who’d worked at the store for a considerable amount of time, had died of cancer just a few years before. Some people guessed he spent a lot of time there because he missed her, but he’d always insist he “just had to get groceries like everyone else.” I learned after a while that he just liked talking to people, making friends and finding commonality with anyone and everyone.
I took a side job with Dan working for his dental appraisal company. It was a fairly simple gig, and it paid really well. We’d go out to a dentist’s office, catalog everything in the building, and then I’d go back and log it all in a spreadsheet, which we’d then turn into a report. After a couple years — eventually I took on balancing Dan’s checkbooks and shipping off his multiple letters to the editor of Murfreesboro’s Daily News Journal — we grew into good friends. He used phrases like “fat cats on Wall Street” and drank a 7-and-7 every day at 3:30 p.m., but only, of course, if his blood sugar permitted. He’d gotten kicked out of a local restaurant frequented by Republicans for arguing a little too loudly. He was rowdy.
Dan had lived a life I wanted to know more about. He’d come up in his career as a traveling dental tool salesman, and his working methods hadn’t changed much since the ’60s. Instead of letting me Google directions, Dan would get to the city he was working in at least two hours early. We’d get breakfast or early lunch at a Waffle House or Cracker Barrel, and then he’d call and get directions to the dentist’s office from there. It was an affront to the concept of time management and, for me, an exercise in patience.
I’d learned on those occasions that the easier way was rarely as interesting, and that a Waffle House in a new town truly was different than the one in your town. It wasn’t the buildings, but rather the people in them, that made them different. Dan never said that, but I remember it in the way he asked questions of people he’d just met, or the way he took delight in leaving an extremely large tip for a server he’d taken a few minutes to get to know.
Our friendship was no different than most of my friendships: We’d grab lunch or coffee or doughnuts together, talk about politics. We’d watch The Price Is Right, or maybe we’d bitch a little about our family or other friends.
But there was one thing that made our friendship different than most: the constant prodding from other people. The questions always varied, but they all boiled down to one basic question, always in a suspicious tone: What business do a 20-something gal and a 70-year-old dude have hanging out together?
I’d meet the question with a sharp, “It’s not like that.”
It always depressed me, though. Had I buddied up with a woman of the same age, the relationship would’ve been viewed as sweet — not questioned as alien, or somehow risqué. But sometimes I understood the suspicion: Men can be dogs, and even elderly ones can be guilty of ghastly behavior.
Near the end of Dan’s life, he moved back to Middle Tennessee after a hospital stint and a subsequent extended stay with his daughter in Florida. When he returned, I took on something of a caregiver role. His sons were often busy, and because Dan lived only about a block from me, I’d walk over and fill his weekly pill container (and get after him when he hadn’t taken certain pills), vacuum his carpet and clean up a couple days’ worth of cornflake-crusted bowls left in the sink. He’d grown a scraggly beard and stopped wearing his suspenders. He’d stopped wanting to go out and grab coffee or even go to the grocery store, and he didn’t want to make new friends. He died not long after.
I didn’t go to Dan’s funeral. Part of me knew then that regardless of how I defended our friendship, people would always see it as strange. I was still wrestling with whether or not our friendship was valid, and what it meant after all. I do visit his grave at least once a year to drink a 7-and-7 and let him know the fat cats are still prowling.
Looking back, I shouldn’t have dignified suspicions with a response at all — I spent too much time considering what our friendship was not. I know now that our bond was valid, that our relationship, while confusing to some, was not complicated to me. Dan was my friend, plain and simple.
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