Yesterday evening, Dwaine and I met up at our former German teacher Mr. Englyng‘s house. I think it’d been 8 or 9 years since I’d last seen him, and 14 for Dwaine.

I got there first and when Mr. Englyng opened the door, I pensively hoped we’d still look familiar to each other, and he looked EXACTLY THE SAME. I mean, he may have lost maybe 10, 15 lbs but he had not aged AT ALL. He was as sharp as ever, as opinionated as ever, as tongue-in-cheek as ever. The four of us (with Mr. Englyng’s wife Kirsten) chatted in the living room until Kirsten left for her weekly painting class, then the three of us had hot dogs and fresh fruit in the back yard patio (the house looked nicer than I’d remembered, they definitely upgraded beautifully and he has a veggie garden patch in the back yard), and didn’t really come back. It got dark, Mr. Englyng lit candles, then eventually turned on some rope lighting he had on the inside perimeter of his patio rafters. And eventually his wife returned from her class and joined us and we kept chatting and laughing.

As we prepared to eat, Dwaine in his usual style suggested we toast to something. We couldn’t think of anything, and Mr. Englyng made a suggestion for something that the Germans do. The German language has a “polite version” of addressing someone and a “familiar version”. The English language used to, too. “You” used to be polite, and “thou” was informal. I would say “thou” to my kid, but “you” to my boss. Kinda like how we don’t say “you” or “him” to the judge or to refer to the judge; we say “your honor” and “his honor.” Anyway, Mr. Englyng proposed that we drop the formal polite “you” and go to the informal “thou”, i.e., call him Finn instead of Mr. Englyng. But only if we feel comfortable with it. I thanked him and Dwaine gave it a few seconds of hard thought, and said he couldn’t do it. There’s a certain level of reverence in our minds about our high school German teacher and we’re just not on his level, we’ll always be a step down. People like us never sleep with our teachers or bosses because we always have that separation in our minds.

We had a great time, I admired the couple with their 44 years of marriage and their apparent respect, love and support of each other, new hobbies they’ve grown to enjoy together in his recent retirement (sailing, hiking, road trips). We reminisced, caught up on each others’ lives, shared stories, ranted about the housing crisis (which Dwaine took personal responsibility for), shared current philosophies on different countries, cultures, political systems, even made a few confessions (Dwaine). I got home at 2:30a tired but very fulfilled. Mr. Englyng made us promise not to make it another 14 years in-between visits. Well, how about a month at the wedding?