We Treat You Like Family

I was talking to my friend Ann today. She’s coming into town in a few days. At first she was going to stay with me then she was going to stay at another friend’s but now she’s back to staying with me. My house is in the midst of a slow-motion reorganization (super-slow-motion, actually … These Things Take Time) but I can get things more-or-less back together if I put my mind to it.

I told her that was fine, I would work on it. I said I would pretend my family was visiting. Which reminded me of a joke, but I couldn’t remember the details. The punch line is something like “Oh I would hope for better than that!”

I was walking home from the library later, and walking is when my mind wanders. While I was walking my mind wandered over to trying to remember what the actual joke was, but instead of landing on the joke, it remembered a story from a long time ago about an actual visit to my actual family.

I’m too lazy to google the joke, but here’s the story about my family.

My first few years out of college I lived in Princeton, New Jersey where I didn’t know anyone when I got there and where there wasn’t much in the way of entertainment activities for a 22-year-old person without much of a local network. However it is centrally located, and I had friends from college and high school up and down the Eastern seaboard so I would often drive to visit friends on weekends. At the time, my brother was living in Arlington, Virginia, working in the DC area. My brother always knows a million people and I knew my brother’s friends from college, and we had mutual friends from high school, and I also had other friends in the DC area, so I would visit him fairly regularly. Whenever I got too tired of being by myself in New Jersey that was an easy place to escape to.

The drive from New Jersey to DC took a few hours (3 or 4, as I recall, depending on traffic and which route I took to get to I-95, etc. … the details are fuzzy lo these many years later). I lived outside of town in the opposite direction from a trip to DC, so usually I would leave directly from work, and I had a fairly normal entry-level office person schedule, with some limited amount of control over when I got to work and when I left. So I would leave New Jersey around five or six o’clock and get to DC around eight-thirty or nine. After happy hour, but before late-night.

And of course this was in the pre- cell phone days, so you didn’t call from the road with an ETA, you talked on the phone during the week and told the person you were visiting what time you expected to be there, and only if something unusual happened would you stop and find a pay phone to call and give an update.

So I’ve made plans for a visit, my brother is expecting me, we’ve confirmed everything on the phone and I’m more-or-less on schedule, maybe a little bit late since I’m usually a little bit late. It’s dark when I get to his place. He lives in a big apartment building, ten or fifteen floors. The building has a buzzer system for guests to be let in — you call the number from the keypad outside the door and the person in the apartment buzzes you in. There’s no lobby or doorman or anything. (And, as noted, NO CELL PHONES.)

So I park in the parking lot and gather my things from the car and walk to the door and pick up the phone receiver and use the keypad to call his apartment and … nothing. There’s no answer. I’m like Hmm, okay. Maybe he went out to the store or something, I’m sure he’ll be here soon.

So I put down my bags and I hang out and wait.

And wait.

I feel like the pre-cellphone stages of waiting were:

(1) Relief [Oh good, I’m not late!];
(2) Patience [No problem, this is fine, I’m sure they’ll be here in a minute];
(3a) Concern [Wait, do I have the right day/time/meeting place? Hmm…];
(3b) Annoyance [Geez, what the heck? They knew I was coming, where are they?]
(4) Worry [Gosh, I hope something terrible hasn’t happened!]

My initial response was definitely Stage (1) — as a chronically borderline late person I’m always relieved to be spared having caused someone else to have to wait for me — which quickly slid into Stage (2), This is Not a Big Deal. (We chronically borderline late people try to be very forgiving of lateness in others; what goes around comes around.) After continued waiting, I was wavering between Stages (3a) and (3b), which tend to happen simultaneously for me, I’m never sure which one to focus on so I kind of just bounce back and forth, and just about to shift into Stage (4) — okay this is bad, I think something is really wrong — when my brother shows up.

He’s like, Heyyy! You’re here!

He tells me he’d been at happy hour at his regular happy hour bar, he’d been wrapping up, getting ready to leave, being good. His bartender friend asked if he wanted another round and he said No. He said, “My sister’s coming to town, I have to get home, she’s meeting me at my apartment. I have to be there to let her in.”

His bartender friend said, “Ahhh, she’s family. She’ll wait.”

And my brother was like, “Hey, you know what? You’re right. On second thought, I will have another beer.”

We treat you like family. We leave you standing outside in the parking lot waiting for us while we have another beer.

Wait, I think that might be the joke.