Wednesday Potluck

“It’s an Osprey”

Willie was smirking, looking up towards the top of a cluster of trees by the water.

“That’s an eagle”, said someone behind us, and now we were all looking up.

It was the most eagle looking eagle there ever was, but Willie, the former fishing guide and resident wildlife jokester was still grinning along with the other fathers gathered for our reunion potluck. The eagle, or perhaps its mother or father had been with us since the beginning.

The Wednesday evening get together was started over ten years ago, when it seemed smarter for a group of youngish parents to collectively dump their kids onto the Montlake Community field and group think their way through supervision and dinner.

It began as a loosely connected network of families brought together by our children’s shared grade school. Our friendships have grown since.

The village mentality served us well, along with proper drinks and a theme for each gathering, our ritual lasted summer after summer until COVID and the variety of high school acceptances made it obsolete.

Now, on the eve of their senior year, one last hurrah was planned, wouldn’t it be nice to get the kids all together again?. Just for old times sake.

It was for the parents’ sake. To record the moment. The kids keep up with each other daily, thank you Snapchat.

We are in a phase where life is happening too quickly and photos must be taken at every opportunity. Shared. Hearted. Proof that we were there. Proof of the moment, of our children who soon won’t be there. We’re wringing out the ounces of this life and holding on to the drops now coming out that once seemed too abundant.

We are visibly older now, but most of us have been in contact frequently enough to have not noticed the changes. Either the group dynamic, or returning to the field or perhaps our boys now full sized and ahem, larger than us suddenly made the passage of time more visible.

There are other clues besides graying hair and altered gaits. There seem to be fewer drinks and the food platters finally have more real estate than the bar layout. Coolers hold more La Croix than IPA, and some of us have stopped drinking altogether.

Our conversations come easily, and in a nod to the hypocrisy of parenthood, the men mostly gather in one group while the women circle yards away, sequestered from each other like a John Hughes High school prom scene. Just go talk to her, son!

I am thinking about age, and the passage of time.

Mostly I feel proud that I am not drinking as I was the last time this group gathered. And I think about the many trips I’d be making to my cooler, the drinks I certainly would have had before I even arrived, and the overly animated it’s not really that funny conversations I would barrel into that meant absolutely nothing.

I think about the time I had an elbow brace on, hiding my gout no doubt caused by inflammation from drinking daily.

I think about the vanity and the lengths I went to in denial. Even aesthetically, because the brace did nothing for the gout and actually hurt my arm even more, but my elbow looked like it had grown a hot, red, shaved nut sack overnight and no one wants to look at that or better yet, talk about it. Most importantly, I didn’t want to explain the cause, so I surely made up some story about tendinitis to hide the brutal embarrassing truth..

Our boys, already thinking of college, are bored. There is no kickball, or whiffle ball needed to help them ‘get the wiggles out’. They don’t even need supervision and I see the irony of youth on their faces- time as abundance. They have too much of it to weigh contemplation, regrets or assessments of life decisions yet.

The eagle is perched facing away from us, its large snow white head is cocked to the side and glaring, seemingly indignant at Willie’s mislabeled joke.

The massive bird has been a mascot to our ritual, always present near the field and out of reach, scanning, hunting.

The man who lives in the neighborhood brings up the years-long construction project nearby. The drilling has unsettled the wildlife along The Cut- a water passageway that divides Lake Union and Lake Washington. Its shores and inlets are marshy and allowed for a marine habitat- perfect hunting for a 4’ tall eagle.

He said the habitat was so disturbed that many of the animals died off or were forced to move, the water became contaminated by centuries old buried debris unearthed from the project.

Yet the eagle stayed.

He said that last summer, the construction and the constant drilling knocked the eagle’s nest from its place high above the neighborhood and it came crashing down at the base of the dead end street behind us.

Splayed out on the pavement were dozens of cat collars.

Our boys will move away in a year.

The construction will continue.