In Praise of Friends, Fine Food, Good Talk

We drove up to Arrowhead a weekend ago to celebrate, among other things, my birthday. We were guests at the beautiful home of Steve and Nona Baer. Their other guests were Dick and June Turpin.

It takes about two hours, I believe, to drive from Los Angeles to Arrowhead. Finding a house in Arrowhead is something else. It took us about four hours, altogether.

My wife was driving, which was not the only reason we were late, but it helped. She had two sheets of handwritten directions, taken over the phone. We stopped at a roadside cafe for lunch. Someone phoned the Baers and returned to the car to say, “It’s only five minutes from here.”

We thereupon started out on a two-hour search for the Baers’ home. We stopped at a gas station and a post office for directions, both sets of which misled us. My wife gave me her directions and asked me to read them. Her handwriting was unreadable. She snatched the paper out of my hand and started reading while driving, which made me very nervous.

Finally, a man at a gas station told us to go down the road exactly six miles and we would come to our turnoff. My wife checked her speedometer and started out. When we had gone six miles, there was no sign of the road. I pointed this out. She said, “Trust me.” At 14 miles we found out we had taken a wrong turn.

I think the problem was that nobody would listen to me. We finally found the house more by chance than anything else.

Fortunately, the Baers had laid in some vodka, and my wife made me a fix, which eased the tension. After a fine dinner prepared by our hostess, we settled into comfortable chairs to spend the evening in amiable talk.

Being all rather more than 50 years old, we naturally talked mostly about the President’s health-care bill and our various medical experiences. Dick told a horrifying story about having his gall bladder sucked out through a tube. I tried to top it with a detailed description of my bypass operation and its aftermath of hallucination, but it was no contest.

“If we were all in our 30s,” I said, “would we be talking about our operations?” Not likely.

After debating the pros and cons of Medicare and other health plans, we segued into recollections of our various courtships, complete with cute meets and anguished turns. The Turpins and my wife and I were the products of blind dates, we confessed. It was altogether a most congenial conversation.

A barking dog kept my wife awake part of the night, but I had been trying a new pair of hearing aids, without much success, and didn’t hear a thing--perhaps because I had taken them out.

In the morning Nona made pancakes, and then the women went into town to shop while we men watched the Raiders-Houston Oilers game on television. It was a thrilling one, with the Raiders winning on a two-point conversion in the final minute.

That evening at dinner, my friends toasted me with champagne and also toasted Steve, whose birthday was only two days away. That evening we talked about our children and grandchildren and, peripherally, politics.

It’s curious that there we were, in the mountains, surrounded by towering pines, with the lake nearby, but we didn’t go water-skiing or even walk through the woods. We ate, drank and talked. Now that’s what I call being civilized.

It’s impossible these days to have a conversation without discussing O.J. Simpson, but we dismissed the subject with only a few speculations, most of us agreeing that he would never be convicted.

At one point someone asked, “Would you vote for Clinton?” Obviously she meant would we vote for him if the election were that day. I don’t remember that there were any definite answers; we all started off in different directions.

My thought was, yes, I would vote for Clinton. He is an intelligent, courageous man trying to do an almost impossible job under unrelenting attack. As for his alleged sexual peccadilloes, they were no worse than Thomas Jefferson’s. Of course, the air was pretty thin up there.

We didn’t start back until after lunch Sunday. As we started off down the mountain, over the Rim of the World highway, my wife was at the wheel again. This time we had no trouble finding our way and were home in little more than two hours.

That night my wife and I watched a sex and violence movie, “Fatal Attraction,” on television, about a happily married man who is seduced by a female demon. We were home again and back in our element.

As a matter of fact, I’d vote for Hillary, if it came to that.

* Jack Smith’s column is published Mondays.