The artificial lights of the interior became brighter and more garish as the light outside faded to black. The tables around them had long since emptied. A few holdouts sat at the edges of the restaurant, but the staff was beginning their preparations for closing.
The different pockets of conversation at the table continued; going stronger now than they had at the outset. Alcohol and full stomachs had lubricated tongues and memories and frequently told stories of the past were unspooled again. The difference this time was that it felt like the end.
Steve was retiring after 25 years. He wasn’t the main cog who kept the group running, but he was always there. He showed up for every event – work and social – and was a respected voice in the room.
I was happy for him. He’d had some health trouble in the last two years and with the demands of the suits, the job was bordering on the impossible for those in the field. Choose your adage, water from a rock or blood from a stone, they were trying to prove if you squeezed hard enough you could get them.
Steve was one of the lucky ones: of an age and in financial position to get out. There were many others who weren’t so lucky. They were being pushed beyond the breaking point by a culture that cared more and more about the bottom line and less about the people who helped get them there.
Nights like these where rare now. Those of us who were local used to gather talk about the state of the company and try to come up with ways to change. Those conversations brought us closer together and helped keep us together. Now, we were too tired. At the end of each day or week, we crawled home to rest battered bodies and spirits, to prepare ourselves for the unknown rigors of the next day.
I was on the edge of most of these crowds. I’d been around but not with this group. I’d shown up, done the work to help them out, but I didn’t have the relationships that stretched back 20 years. The folks I’d been close to then were gone. Weeded out by restructurings or having found the courage to leap before they were pushed.
I sat looking at this group, most of us middle-aged, two decades from retirement, at least, and I wondered when we’d next gather like this in celebration. When we would come back together to build stronger bonds?
The times were changing. As the laughter rose to a crescendo around the table again, I smiled sadly at the memory of other nights spent together, and wondered if we’d ever see them again.
