I saw Nate last night. It’d been a long time. He was dressed in a dark blue cotton polo and blue jeans, very similar to the uniforms we wore when we both worked baggage for Aloha Airlines back in college.
It surprised me. That it was happening there. I was having a few at the Banyans, a place I’d not visited for years. When I saw his reflection in the mirror behind the bar, at first I didn’t believe it was him.
“Lanning,” how are you doing?” he asked, squeezing my shoulder as he slid into a stool beside me.
“Ah, well, pretty amazing, Nate. Retirement is the bomb. Nate, it’s been so many years. How did you get here?”
Nate ordered a Primo draft. “I know, yeah. Even I’m amazed. It took some doing.”
“Where have you been?” I asked. “Ah, how have you been?”
Sipping on his beer, he looked at me in the mirror. “I’ve been a heck of a long way from here, I can tell you. I guess I’m doing okay. Not feeling any pain, at least.”
I nodded. That was good to hear. “Why are you here, Nate. What’s got you back?”
He laughed. “Would you believe me if I told you I came all this way to see you?”
This seemed hardly likely, yet made perfect sense at the same time.
“Remember,” Nate said, “the last time we were here?”
“I do,” I said. “Must have been around 2004. It was right before you left. That’s the last time I saw you.”
“Yeah,” he said. “And that Hawaiian group was playing. They were friends of yours, right? That bass player was something. Remember how I asked you if he gave lessons?”
“Yes, yes, right. You said you wondered if your son could take lessons from him. So did you ever ask him?”
“Nah, I never had a chance. I left right after that.”
I wondered if his son had ever taken bass lessons from my friend or anyone else, but I didn’t ask.
“Nice phone,” he said, picking it up.
“Yeah, it’s the latest iPhone.”
“The latest what?”
“The latest phone from Apple. Just came out a few months ago.”
Nate tapped the screen. “Wow, these things have come a long way.”
“Right, right.” They had.
“I remember when I bought mine,” he said. “I think they were called chocolate bars because of the shape. Pretty ugly.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the first one I bought, too. It was between the Nokia and the Motorola flip-phone.”
Placing my phone on the bar, Nate picked up his beer and sipped.
He looked at me in the mirror again. “Remember the day your bought that first phone?”
That day was clear in my memory. Back then, several vendors sold various cell phones and plans in the UH Mānoa campus center. I’d been eyeing them for a few weeks. Finally, that day, I’d pulled the trigger.
“Hey,” Nate said, downing his beer, “I gotta go again. Good seeing you, Lanning. Keep enjoying that retirement for as long as you can.”
He stood and reached into his pocket.
“No no, I said. “I got it.”
He thanked me and squeezed my shoulder again.
“No no. Thank you, Nate, for everything ever,” I said as he disappeared.
That day I bought my first cell phone, I’ll never forget it. That evening the word about Nate spread quickly. He’d been playing his usual after-work basketball game with his banker buddies.
When I got the call on my landline that night – no one knew my cell phone number yet, of course – I cried. We’d been good friends for many years.
Nate’s funeral drew an enormous crowd. He had a huge number of friends in the business community. My dad and then my mom would be buried in the same cemetery several years later. Whenever I go there to say hello to them, I always stop by to share a beer with Nate.
Lanning Lee 