Transcript: Episode 61

"Reunions = high school + time"

Doug French: We should just get started as soon as we get started because you have a hard out.

Magda Pecsenye Zarin: Yeah.

Doug: What is Hungarian for “hard out?”

Magda: I don't know. But they probably turn it into a verb. Hardoutizodik.

Doug: Okay. Well, you should bring that up.

Magda: They turn everything into a verb. Like to watch TV is “I am TVing” or like “I TV.”

Doug: But “watch TV” is a verb.

Magda: You don't have to say “I watch TV.” You say “I TV.” “I internet.”

Doug: Oh.

Magda: Yeah, it's very funny.

Doug: I podcast. Although that works in this situation, so... Yeah. So, wow, maybe podcasts are Hungarian.

Magda: So my Hungarian teacher and his wife have started doing these little, like, five-minute videos on Youtube. Except there's no video content, it's just the words in Hungarian and then the translation in English, which is useful for people who are trying to learn Hungarian. And it's just them speaking the script. It's like historical stuff and about holidays in Hungary. And they have these beautiful voices! Like voices made for podcasts, absolutely, with perfect accents and everything, and I can't really understand what they're saying [laughs] at all.

Doug: I have had such positive feedback from Friday Flames.

Magda: That is fantastic.

Doug: I mean, I didn't know what to write, frankly. I was sitting there, it's Friday, and all I could think of was just how completely clouded my mind is, or was, because Marty and Dennis had been outside pounding on my home for three days, four days, whatever. And so I just went with what I was feeling and it just occurred to me, I'm like, is this what menopause is? [laughs]

Magda: It kind of is. Like your brain's just going around and around and around, you know. Mike will say to me, what are you thinking about? I'm like, “How you can't buy an even number of things that cost 57 cents.” And he's like, what? But I'm like, “You asked me literally, what am I thinking about right now?” And I'm not thinking about anything except this completely random thing. I'm thinking about, like, “Why is the underside of a plant a different color green than the top side of a plant,” right? [laughs]

Doug: That's what you were thinking?

Magda: Yeah. Every time he asks me what I'm thinking, like, you know, in the beginning I was trying to pull out like deep thoughts, make him think I was smart. But now I figure if he asks me what I'm thinking, he's going to get what I'm actually thinking. And at any point it's some random thing like, you know that marcato part on “Let It Whip” by the Dazz Band? The “there is no time to lo-o-ose,” that part? But the part that leads up to that is so marcato. 

Doug: Well, see, this is the genius of your personality because it definitely brings out a binary approach to dealing with you, because there is one type of person who would ask you, “hey, penny for your thoughts,” get those thoughts, and be promptly discouraged from asking you ever again. [Magda laughs] But, there are also the special guys who are like, tell me more. 

Magda: This is why Mike is the one, right? 

Doug: In my situation, this is why I still enjoy podcasting with you. Because I can ask you, hey, what are you thinking about? And I know I'll get something weird like that. And that's still interesting. Because normally it's like you share your thoughts and it's just small talk. And small talk is the death of us all. So thank you for that.

Magda: I am a big, big fan of small talk. However. [laughs] When you're married to someone, you don't really need, necessarily, small talk. But the things I'm thinking about are not like deep thoughts.

Doug: Well, exactly. You don't need to go deep. If you are having kind of a casual interaction saying, “hey, what are you thinking about?” “Oh, you know, you can't buy an even number of things for 57 cents.” You know, you want to be surprised pleasantly.

Magda: Right. I mean, you know, you can if you're spending $57.

Doug: if you analyze sales tax figures throughout the country and went to a bunch of impulse purchases on the counter, you could do that. And I think that would be something that our son would figure out. He'd make that a thing to do. Like when he did the balls of twine, he'd want to just do a quest nationwide to buy two things for 57 cents.

Magda: I agree.

Doug: But I wanted to mention, too, Marty and Dennis.

Magda: Okay. For people who didn't read Friday Flames last week,

Doug: Yeah. First of all, where are you? How do you not read Friday Flames? Are you, I mean, you get insights like this every week. Like what are two things you can buy for 57 cents? [laughs]

Magda: So, okay. You rent your house.

Doug: Oh, you could conjure something that can say, I will sell you two things for 57 cents.

Magda: Right.

Doug: That would save a lot of effort.

Magda: Yeah. Okay. So you rent your house and your landlord sent somebody out to scrape all the paint on the outside of the house in preparation for repainting the house.

Doug: Right. First repaint job in 13 years that I know of. I mean, that I've been here. Who knows how long ago they painted it when they were here.

Magda: And so the guys who are scraping the paint are named Marty and Dennis.

Doug: For our purposes, yes.

Magda: Right.

Doug: Very entertaining people.

Magda: And you could hear their conversations.

Doug: Oh, yeah. And I went and had a few with them. You know, I went out and chatted with them and they were very chatty, nice guys. They're exactly who you thought they are. but in a very entertaining way. And sometimes I was out there actually talking to them. And sometimes I had no choice but to listen to them when they were right outside my office. But I wanted to say like, after I wrote that and sent it out and left for the evening to go hug the governor, by the way, that was a nice.

Magda: I saw that! I was very jealous.

Doug: And I even got near Gavin Newsom. She smelled so much better than Gavin Newsom did.

Magda: Are you implying that Gavin Newsom didn't smell good?

Doug: No, not at all.

Magda: Okay, you're just saying that Big Gratch smelled better?

Doug: He chose his own scent, and she chose her scent, and I enjoyed hers more.

Magda: Oh, okay. All right, I get that.

Doug: But, you know, how often do you get to smell a bunch of governors? You know, I even smelled Tony Ewers. He was a distant third. [both laugh] Josh Shapiro was on the tour, but he wasn't there. He had the night off.

Magda: Oh, okay. So you don't know how Josh Shapiro smells.

Doug: I have no idea how Josh Shapiro smells.

Magda: You know how they make those candles that are like the scent of the state? Have you seen them?

Doug: No.

Magda: You probably don't get these ads because you're not a middle-aged woman. So you're not the target market for scented candles.

Doug: Probably. That's an interesting, there's a podcast topic for another time, how we're marketed to differently.

Magda: But there is a series, some candle company makes candles that are alleged to smell like the different states. So you can buy... you know, like one state's supposed to smell like wood smoke and pumpkins. One state is supposed to smell like ozone and celery. You know what I mean? They come up with these things. I think the Ohio candle is unscented.

Doug: I want to live in a state that smells like ozone and celery. [both laugh]

Magda: I think the Ohio candle is unscented, which is...a funny joke to me. But now I'm thinking they could do an entire series on the governors of each state and how they smell. I would buy a scented candle that smelled like Big Gretch.

Doug: Right. And Tim Walz smells like a duck blind and grass stains.

Magda: Tim Walz smells like chili, fall leaves, and Wrigley's Spearmint Gum. That's what I'm positive he smells like.

Doug: All right, this is the debate we're going to launch. What does your governor smell like? Respond in the comments. [both crack themselves up] Well, but I wanted to add that as a bit of gravitas in the end, one of the things I was really inspired by was that Dennis is really good friends with his ex. They have five kids.

Magda: Dennis the painter is really good friends with his ex?

Doug: Yeah. Yeah. And so I asked him about like, what was custody like? And he was like, well, we didn't really use a lawyer so much.

Magda: Oh, boy.

Doug: I'm like, oh God, who knows what kind of chaos they were using. But then he mentioned, he's like, yo, when I finish up here, I'm going to go over to my ex's house. You know, she just got diagnosed with blood cancer.

Magda: Oh my God.

Doug: I know. And it's like, wait, what? And he's like, yeah, it's just, it's, they need to draw it periodically. It's like, this is her life now. She's going to have essentially like blood dialysis the rest of her life.

Magda: I hope for her sake that her blood cancer is exactly like the blood cancer that my grandmother had. She was diagnosed with blood cancer when she was like 95. And they said, “if you don't do anything, she's got a 10 to 12 year prognosis.”

Doug: At 95? 

Magda: Yeah. So we did nothing. And she died of other causes at 101, right? But it was just one of those things that they had to monitor. So my wish for Dennis's ex-wife is that it is as mild and unalarming, unemergent as my grandmother's was. They told us what the treatment was, and the treatment was not particularly difficult. It wasn't like a big course of chemo or radiation or anything like that. But it was still more than we wanted to put a 95-year-old woman through, considering that she was going to die before the cancer got really serious anyway.

Doug: So Dennis, if you're out there and you're listening, which you're not, but bottom line is I had a fun time kind of taking the mick out of them, you know, having fun at some of the weird stories that they told, but I left the house. It was just so sweet the way he just was like, Yeah, man, I just, I go over there and the kids and I hang out and I take care of her and we get along really well. We're going to play board games. And I was like, oh. It was a really good story. It's a sad state of affairs, but they're together as a family, even though they're not married anymore. And so that's what I took from it. So even though I was cavalier and being snarky because my brain was a Cobb salad underneath, they're just, they're both good people and my house looks great.

Magda: Yeah, yeah.

Doug: So if we're talking about our weekends, you know, your weekend is what we were going to talk about this week, right?

Magda: Yeah, but there was one thing that happened this weekend that doesn't have to do with the topic.

Doug: Oh, all right. Let's start with that. Sure.

Magda: I got invited to an heirloom apple tasting.

Doug: Heirloom.

Magda: At the house of a friend of mine. I'll actually mention her name. We can do a little plug for her. Her name is Tammy Coxen. And she, professionally, is a cocktail mixologist person, cocktail taster, cocktail mixologist. She teaches classes online and how to make cocktails. She kind of exploded during the pandemic because she had been doing in-person classes on cocktails. And then she's just started doing online classes where you'd sign up, she'd give you the list of what you needed, and then on a Friday night, everybody would just get on Zoom and make cocktails with her. And it sort of turned into a party for a lot of people. And it was like their social outlet. 

Magda: But anyway, the whole point of this is that she runs a podcast called My Tiny Bottles, where she finds little tiny bottles of liquor and opens them and tastes them. So she has a great palate. She's really, really used to figuring out the different ways things taste. And like, is there a standard? And what is the standard? Has the standard changed throughout the years? Whatever. So she and her partner went up to New Hampshire, I think like last weekend or the weekend before, and bought a whole bunch of heirloom apples. They had 17 different varieties. And then just invited everybody they knew who they thought might be a nerd like that. And she told me she laughed because she sent the invitation to me and I responded, “This is one zillion percent within my areas of interest.” [both laugh]

Doug: So if someone asks you what you're thinking about, you can say 17 heirloom apples.

Magda: So they had all the apples laid out around their big dining room table in different ways. 

Doug: It's like a seance. 

Magda: They had a section for apples that are really good raw, apples that might have something, you know, some kind of special difference about them. Oddballs. There was an apple called a Sheep's Nose that had a really horrible texture, but kind of a decent taste. Apples that needed to be stored. And that was interesting to me. They were apples that were supposed to be picked in August or September, but stored and the flavor wouldn't really be at its peak until closer to Christmas.

Magda: It was interesting, once you knew that that was a thing, I tasted a couple of them and they just tasted like, I don't know how to describe, like tight. Like, have you ever had a bottle of red wine that wasn't like a super new one? It wasn't like Beaujolais Nouveau or anything. It was like a three or four or five year old bottle of red wine, and you drink it right out of the bottle and it just feels so tight and–

Doug: Drink red wine out of the bottle? You are from Ohio.

Magda: What, because I said “tee-ite wee-ine”?

Doug: No, you're supposed to pour wine out and let it open up and breathe and give it a shake, all that stuff. You don't drink it out of the bottle. You miss the aroma while you're drinking.

Magda: Well, that's exactly the point of these apples that are supposed to be stored. They don't taste good when you pull them right off the tree. They need to develop by being stored and have whatever happens to the sugar in them and all that kind of stuff. They're supposed to be eaten closer to Christmas. And you could tell. It was very interesting.

Doug: So is she going to distill one of those into like schnapps or anything? Or is she going to make liqueur?

Magda: Well, she had a selection of apple brandy. And I tried every kind. So by the end of the party, I was all red-faced and flushed. And Mike had to drive. Mike didn't like any of the apple brandies. He doesn't like super alcohol-ish alcohol.

Doug: Brandy is an acquired taste, I found. I think brandy is marketed in a very appealing way, but it takes a moment. I do enjoy bourbon or rye. And brandy kind of seems a little weaker. It doesn't satisfy as much as what I'm used to, so I mean I don't mind it, but I don't seek it out.

Magda: Right. I mean to me bourbon has a rounder flavor. Just more layered flavor from the get-go, whereas brandy to me is very clearly made from fruits. So it really has that fruit note and this, especially. It was like six kinds of apple brandy, aged different amounts, and if you wanted to tell the difference you could tell the difference. If you hadn’t wanted to tell the difference you didn’t have to tell the difference.

Doug: Or like some apple brandy, like you put it over ice cream or some Calvados over vanilla ice cream.

Magda: Oh, I guess. I mean, I kind of think the best use of brandy is in eggnog, but then I'm an eggnog fan.

Doug: See, I put bourbon in my eggnog.

Magda: So the apple that won, I don't remember what she called the voting. It was just you were allowed to, any apple that you thought was truly excellent, you were allowed to put a hash mark on the paper. And then the one that accumulated the most hash marks won.

Doug: Oh, I didn't realize this was a contest. Okay.

Magda: Yeah, it was. Well, you know, the apples didn't really know that it was a contest, either. They didn't show up showing their best selves. They just sort of let themselves be sliced. 

Doug: Stage moms on the side there. “Come on, Apple, smile.”

Magda: The apple that won was called Reine des Reinettes, which I think means queen of princesses, queen of queens. I don't know. And it was really beautiful. It had this kind of sweet, but not overly sweet taste. And then suddenly you'd get this tart punch in it. So it was a very well-rounded flavor. So that's what I've got on heirloom apples.

Doug: All right. Well, for those of you who are still listening, welcome to episode 61 of the When the Flames Go Up podcast. Which has gotten off the rails already. No, well, I'll keep that in mind for sure. I mean, it's apple season after all. I'm going to bike out to Dexter next weekend and get some more. 

Magda: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a set of people who are like, ooh, heirloom apple tasting, and a set of people who are like, heirloom apple tasting, what? So, you know.

Doug: So tell me how your weekend went. Tell me how this reunion went.

Magda: Okay, so it was my husband Mike's 35th high school reunion. And it was interesting to go and experience it as somebody who wasn't the reuner and didn't really know much about the high school. Mike doesn't hang out with a lot of friends from high school. You know, he is a quiet person and I think he thinks of himself as having been sort of shy and quiet a lot of the time. And so the official reunion activities were a dinner for every reunion class at the actual school, and then the Head of the Charles race, which is a regatta with crew racing, was yesterday. And his school has a boathouse right on the Charles River. And so they hosted anyone, you know, the alums and family and stuff who wanted to come and watch the regatta, and they had three boats racing in the Head of the Charles from their school with their current high school students. One of his classmates hosted a cocktail party just for their class at their house, which is about 20 minutes from our house. We could see who was registered to come to the event on Saturday night but we didn't have any idea who was going to show up at the cocktail party on Friday night, and so he couldn't even prep me for who might be there because he hadn't talked to anyone to see if they were there, except for the host of the party.

Doug: Well, what were you gonna do? I mean, do you have to like do research about like, “and she was in my biology class.” I mean, who cares?

Magda: That's an interesting thing for you to say, Doug, because in my experience with you, you like to know sort of who's going to be there because sometimes you do research on that person to find out that they went to the high school 10 minutes away from you. You know what I mean?

Doug: No, you can't conflate that with Senator Mark Kelly. [both laugh] It's not the same thing. It's heirloom apples and oranges.

Magda: Okay, what if Senator Mark Kelly had gone to, had been in Mike's high school class? Like, I mean, that was just my thing. You know, I like to know sort of who's going to be there. Were they somebody that you were friends with at the time? Was there somebody that you had a falling out with? Like, is there somebody I shouldn't talk to? That kind of thing.  

Doug: Well, that's true. Yeah. There's like, who should I avoid? That's that's, that's the big one.

Magda: Yeah, exactly! And he really didn't know who was coming and he hadn't talked to most of these people in a while. And we walked in, we walked into the Friday cocktail party and this chorus of people yelled out, “Mike!” And I was surprised because he had led me to believe that nobody knew who he was. And it turns out that a lot of people knew who he was.

Doug: That tracks. That makes sense. “And why is your wife so much better looking now?” [both laugh]

Magda: So I was told stories all night by various people about all of the things that happened in high school that they remembered Mike for. And it wasn't like Mike was a big troublemaker, Mike was always getting into scrapes, that kind of stuff. Like a lot of the stories were: “We were so bad, and the only reason we didn't get sent to jail was because Mike had his head screwed on straight and stopped it from escalating.” 

Doug: Right. 

Magda: So it wasn't like he had a different personality in high school. But these people really had incredibly fond memories of him.

Doug: And he was as surprised by that as you were.

Magda: I don't know if he was surprised by that. I think he just thinks of himself as sort of shy and not, you know, not the life of the party. But the discovery was you don't have to be the life of the party to have had people remember you fondly, have liked you then, and like you now.

Magda: So while people were telling me these stories of all these fond memories they had of Mike, they were also talking about how they thought they had been in high school and how they were different now, and how surprised they were to hear stories from other people about them. Like, it really just seemed like everybody had an idea of how they were perceived that now didn't seem to be how people had perceived them. And my interest in this and my question about this is, is it because everybody's over 50 now and you're sort of reevaluating your relationship with yourself, the world, your place in the world, all of this kind of stuff? And it's okay to admit to yourself that you weren't really fully cooked by the time you were in high school. And you didn't really have any idea how you were coming off to other people.

Doug: Well, people are so much more interesting and welcoming and loving and giving when their prefrontal cortex is fully formed.

Magda: Oh, yeah.

Doug: And I'm actually enjoying this conversation, too, because it's one thing to go to your college reunion, right? You've been to college reunions. You knew each other in college. You have a lot of mutual friends. That was an entirely different vibe. But now, you had to go in strictly as a fact finder, you know, just to be along for the ride and get a sense of what he was like before you even met him 30 years ago. And that's got to be illuminating in some ways.

Magda: It was very interesting. Sometimes people would indicate a knowledge level of him that was not the knowledge level he had assumed they had of him. And I thought that was fascinating. People also were talking about other people in the class. So, you know, there's also this whole phenomenon about people who move away and people stay here, or people who go away to college and then come back.

Doug: A lot of my high school classmates are all still very close and still in the same place and hanging out, as I see on Facebook from time to time.

Magda: Yeah, same with me. And I am still very close with a lot of my high school classmates, some of whom stayed and some of whom went away. But what seemed to be happening, in this sample I had doing my little anthropology project, was that there were people who had stayed local who had ended up running into each other and had started becoming friends 20, 25, 30 years after high school when they had decidedly not been friends in high school. Like I talked to... 

[Magda’s phone rings]

Doug: Now I've asked to silence all devices before we start this. You know this. [Magda laughs]

Magda: Like, I talked to a couple people who said to me, oh, yeah, we've been hanging out a lot with so-and-so. And it's very funny because we actually didn't like each other in high school and only started talking at something, you know, 10 years later or 20 years later and realized we had a lot in common. And that sort of thing happened to me, too. Like, I'm friends with people that I went to high school with now that I don't think I ever talked to in high school. And it wasn't, you know, it wasn't, like, malicious or we really didn't like each other.

Doug: Yeah, you just didn't run in the same circles. Yeah, you just got into one group and that's where you stayed. 

Magda: Yeah, exactly. There were 300 people in my high school class. And so you're just not going to know everyone. Mike's high school class was closer to 100. So I think they did all sort of know each other. But just this idea that you are really a different person when you are older and you have more in common with people than you ever thought you did. And you can have sort of the comfort of having known someone for a long time while also having something genuinely in common with the person now that maybe you didn't earlier.

Doug: Yeah. I actually talked to the kids about this a bit. Just the idea of how interesting it is to make friends in high school and college just because I'm not sure why we're that much more open to building a friendship that lasts 40 years. I don't know. All the formative experiences you have together, there's just something special about that that you never get back. But if you can, kind of go back to your reunion and definitely just mix it up with someone you never knew or even bury the hatchet with someone you hated, which happens more often than not. That's the best part, I think. You can just chill out and compare your baggage and see how you're holding up. I mean, you know, I go to every reunion I can at UVA just because every year they do a great job. And every year I walk in and I see people I haven't seen in five years and I start talking with them like it's been five minutes.

Magda: Okay, but UVA is different. What about your high school? Do you go to your high school reunions?

Doug: I did, actually. I went to our 35th.

Magda: Okay.

Doug: And it was great. Yeah, we had a great photo with everybody. We even talked a lot about politics, even six years ago. It was pretty cordial. It was divisive, but it was cordial. We had a ball. And the thing is, it's kind of a clean slate, you know? I mean, you meet somebody you haven't seen in a long time, maybe interacted once or twice on Facebook. But then you see them as adults and they have adult kids or whatever. And it's, yeah, it was completely seamless. I had a ball. And it was worth the drive. You know, I have no ties in the area anymore. My parents are gone. My whole family's gone. You know, someone painted our house like blueberry purple.

Magda: What??

Doug: Yeah.

Magda: Wow.

Doug: Yeah. Yeah, the high school vibe is very different from the college vibe. Which is why I envy my parents in a way. Because my parents, they moved away back to like within half an hour of my dad's alma mater. But that means they have reunions basically every couple of weeks. Because when you're in your 80s, what are you waiting for?

Magda: Okay. But that also requires the other people that you want to have reunions with also live in the same area.

Doug: Oh, sure. Yeah. And that's the point. I mean, I think he knew a lot of his classmates still lived up there. And he knew he would be socializing with them a lot in retirement.

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: And I got to say, if I had the chance, I have not ruled out moving back to New Jersey.

Magda: Yeah. Well, I think your parents, I mean, you know, you grew up in a town that was very, very much a family town. Like it was absolutely a place that people moved to have kids and put them through the public school system and raise kids there. So I'm imagining that the only reason to stay when you didn't have kids anymore is that your own kids were living there. and raising their kids there, and you wanted to stay close.

Doug: Right, but all their friends, you know, my friends' parents and everyone they associated with, they all left. Like Senator Mark Kelly, for example, who left South Orange as soon as he could. {both cackle]

Magda: You know, like if it's a public high school and everybody lives in the area, you go to your reunion and it's like, oh, does your mom still live in the same house?

Doug: – that we used to hang out in every afternoon.

Magda: Yeah, right. Exactly. And that is much more likely. And so someone moving away, I think, is kind of a bigger deal. Whereas this was sort of, you know, are you in the area? Well, and, you know, alum engagement is one of my sort of pet topics. And so it was interesting to see that.

Doug laughs: Which pet topic? How many pet topics are there? Seriously, there's got to be a few thousand.

Magda: I have ADHD, so there's an infinite number of pet topics.

Doug: I was going to say, I mean, what isn't a pet topic of yours?

Magda: Right. But how ADHD people have pet topics is yet another one of my pet topics. There you go. But it was interesting to see.

Doug laughs: Your ADHD brain is slowly eating itself.

Magda: Yeah. How the head of the school was interacting with the alums at the event on Saturday night and trying to figure out how they would stay engaged with that high school when she knew that they also had colleges that they had gone to that they were probably primarily aligned with. It seemed like she had thought a lot about what the place of your private high school was in your mind and in your memory and, you know, like how much support you would be willing to give? And not just financially, but were you interested in alum programming more than just a reunion every five years? They have a pitch contest, which I thought was very interesting. And the winner of the pitch contest gets money.

Doug: Really? 

Magda: But everyone who enters the pitch contest they are now trying to set up with older alums who can do some mentoring for them, and I thought that was an interesting thing for a high school to be branching into.

Doug: Well, I mean, it's a high school in Cambridge, Mass. You know, it's definitely got a bit of juice behind it.

Magda: Yeah. Sort of the whole weekend was like being on this podcast, because there was a long discussion of dealing with your parents, health issues when your parents won't let you in to help them enough and then you discover that they've been having these problems and sort of limping along, and they hadn't mentioned it to you, and you know how do you get access to help them without making them feel bad. There were discussions of all of the things that your parents have accumulated and maybe they've downsized, maybe they're moving someplace else and what's going to happen to all of that stuff.

Doug: It's such a universal thing.

Magda: Yeah. And there were discussions of kids. Everybody at the reunion, I think, was around 53 years old. And so people had kids that were in college, kids that were out of college, kids that were in high school. There were some people that had middle schoolers. And so there were just a lot of discussions about how do you parent kids that aren't babies? It was lovely to see people talking and being open about this. I think there were more men than women that came back to the reunion. It was very interesting to hear this topic out of the mouths of men. Because, you know, I know mostly women, and I am almost always talking to women and very rarely talking to men. So it was very interesting to hear it from these men who I don't think were trying to impress me, but were just talking about their lives.

Doug: Well, that's refreshing, truthfully. Anytime, you know, a man can, A, take interest in the things that tend to beset us in our 50s and then talk about them in an intelligent way, and in a forthcoming way, again without some other ulterior agenda, more men need to do that. You know can you imagine having a middle schooler now at our age?

Magda: Yeah. Because I've done it enough times that I think, like, you know, I would know what to do. Would I have the tolerance for a lot of it? I don't know. I really don’t think so.

Doug: I met a lot of men who had kids later in life, especially when they had their second families, you know, they'd have kids and then get divorced and then marry a younger woman and have kids with her. And, you know, a couple of dudes in their sixties who had toddlers.

Magda: Oh, wow.

Doug: I'm not going to judge too hard, but you know, if I were in the position to have more kids now, I wouldn't do it because I want my kids to have a dad around, you know?

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: And, It's just, it's a selfish thing, I think, to bring a kid into the world knowing you're not going to live to see their 21st birthday, which I'm really, I'm pretty certain that's not going to happen.

Magda: I don't want to say that it's selfish because I think a lot of people have an urge to have kids, right? And if you have that urge to have kids, those humans are going to exist. I just don't want to say it's selfish. You know, I think women are lucky that we're limited, right? Like it's not a decision that I would need to make at this point. And I'm really looking ahead to grandchildren, but can I imagine having a grandchild in middle school? Absolutely. But that's a different kind of responsibility.

Doug: Oh, of course. Yeah. You're not the parent. Yeah.

Magda: Yeah. You're not the parent. And like, you don't have to preserve all kinds of weird relationships that you have to preserve when you're a parent. Like if my grandchild was having problems at middle school, I'd just walk in and like knock some heads together and be like, look, figure this out.

Doug: It's interesting because I briefly, briefly went out with a woman in her early 40s.

Magda: Okay.

Doug: Which was young for me.

Magda: It's very young for you. I mean, I was thinking like, oh, that's not that young. But then I was like, oh, wait, Doug's not 50 anymore, Doug’s 59. [both laugh] You know, like when you're 50 going out with someone in your early 40s isn't like a big deal. And I think the age difference becomes less the older you get. So I'm sure that there are plenty of people who could have a great relationship with, you know, a 17-year-age gap. But also it sounds like if one person's at a stage of life that the other person just doesn't want to be at anymore, that's an issue.

Doug: Anyway, we talked a bit about, again, just hypothetically, this is, it would never got even, you know, but this is the whole idea because she doesn't have kids and is still interested in having them. And I couldn't lose the thought that her age was as close to Robert's as it is to mine. Yeah.

Magda: Yes. I mean, and that was a thing that I used to think of a lot when I was out in the world and dating and people would be like, oh, you know, what's your age range of who you would date? And my immediate answer was: has to be closer in age to me than to my kid. And people would be like, oh, really? Like, yes, really.

Doug: So you didn't rule out the whole cougar aspect. You could date a dude who was like 10 years younger than you.

Magda: Well, I guess it just meant my bottom age range was no more than 14 years younger than I am.

Doug: So, that tracks, right? You could have had a boy toy.

Magda: I can't imagine being with a 37-year-old at this point in my life. 

Doug: I couldn't either. 

Magda: I mean, I'm, I can talk to anyone about anything. So yes, if I had a 37-year-old FRIEND, would we have a lot to talk about? Oh, tons to talk about, but trying to be in a romantic relationship with someone who's 37, it's just, you know, you have different expectations for even the concept of talking to someone. And yeah,

Doug: Yeah, we ran out of stuff to talk about.

Magda: Like, I'm friends with people of all ages. I don't want to date people of all ages. I mean, I don't want to date anybody now anyway because I have my sweet Mike. But, you know.

Doug: In my limited universe, I would say that, I mean, it's plainly obvious that women my age are just that much more interesting. Truth be told. And there's always something new to talk about with someone who's age appropriate. I mean, you date someone super young. That works for a little while. But in the end, it's just they just can't relate. And I couldn't relate to her.

Magda: You know what? I think that's really what it was that struck me so much about this reunion. I think that we get happier with ourselves when we're over 50, but that people weren't expecting everyone to be happier with themselves and people weren't expecting everyone to be happier with them, if that makes some sort of sense.

Magda: Like people really did just have a great time. Like the class of ‘89 got kicked out of the school on Saturday night. They started flickering the lights. They shoved us out the door. And then people were standing out in front of the school at night in the chilly autumn air talking for like another 40 minutes. And it wasn't the other classes doing that. It was this class that is the first class reunion when everybody was over 50. And people were just delighted to be talking to each other and discovering who these other people were.

Doug: Yeah, because shit's getting real now. And you know that life is too short for petty grievances, you know?

Magda: But it's not even people who had petty grievances. Like some of those people, you know, we walked away and I said to Mike, are you Facebook friends with so and so and so and so. And he was like, no, it would never have occurred to me to be Facebook friends with those people because we never talked when we were in high school. But we had such a great evening with them.

Doug: And they're local. So you could see them again and again if you wanted to.

Magda: Well, some of them were local. Some of them weren't. One of them was stopped here on the way before she went to lead a meditation retreat in Spain.

Doug: Oh, cool.

Magda: You know, it was just a lot of really interesting people doing really interesting things. And I would like to bring more of that into my daily life, like that awareness of the fact that we may be invisible, because I think a lot of people don't pay any attention to people in their 50s anymore. And, you know, women talk about it all the time. Women become invisible when we're over 40. We're definitely invisible in our 50s. But I have to say, I think men are invisible in their 50s also.

Doug: We are?

Magda: Yeah, I think so. I think like society just isn't focused on men in their 50s. Like, you know, it's either you're about to retire from your job as like head of corporate for whatever. Yeah. Or, you know, you're a young dad. 

Doug: No, I get it.

Magda: Yeah. 

Doug: In fact, now that you mentioned it, I mean, I do hang out with a bunch of cyclists now. Many of them are, you know, in their 30s and 40s with young children. 

Magda: Yeah. 

Doug: Sometimes I forget that I'm pushing 60, and I have to retreat sometimes, and it's like, oh, yeah, right.

Magda: Just because the rest of the world doesn't notice us doesn't mean we can't notice each other.

Doug: Yeah.

Magda: I'm fine just having people who are interesting, who think I'm interesting.

Doug: Yeah, I think you're pretty interesting. 

Magda: Thanks. 

Doug: Yeah, with your store of interesting pet subjects, the library.

Magda laughs: I can't help it. It's just the way my brain goes.

Doug: I know. And that's the appreciation I have for your brain that I think, even when we were friends before we got married, that never fully registered with me for whatever reason. I just knew you were great to talk to, independent of why.

Magda: But you didn't realize that there were just thoughts popping in from all over the place.

Doug: Oh, yeah. Your entire brain is just a bottle of champagne.

Magda: I've had all these ideas. Like I remember in 1992, they were about to raise the price of the stamp from like, 23 cents to 24 cents or something like that, a first class stamp. And I said they should just raise it to 50 right now because then you could get two for a dollar. And if they raise it to 50 now, they wouldn't have to raise the price of a stamp again for another 50 years. And of course, it's not like I had the ear of the Postmaster General to impart this information to anyone. And now here it is, and we've caught up, and the Postal Service is alarmingly close to decay. And what if? What if? 

Doug: Alarmingly close. Have you been to the post office lately?

Magda: Yes, I have. They're very nice people.

Doug: Yeah, but it's not a fun place to be. Yeah, they're working hard. even in Ann Arbor, you'd think, I mean, I guess it doesn't matter because federal is federal, but they're very helpful people. And I'm not sure how they manage it because everything there is meant to make them as uncomfortable as possible, it seems.

Magda: Yeah, they don't have enough resources. And I think, you know, the Detroit Postal Service was hit very extremely hard with COVID at the beginning of COVID. I mean, they had people just dying all the time in March and April and May and June of 2020. So that affected the entire region because it wasn't just local letter carriers. It was people in the sorting centers and all that kind of stuff. Also just the changing idea of like, does some physical object of mail come to your house every day?

Doug: I got to say one of the things about our high school reunions that also wasn't necessarily predictable. I think we get along in part because so many of us are dead. And I've talked to you about this.

Magda bursts out laughing: Wow, okay, that was a very uncomfortable laugh I just gave. You get along because they're dead? I mean, that's like, oh, my children are so wonderful when they're asleep.

Doug: No, no, well, we did have a seance, and we did bring in our old classmates, and they were telling us what the afterlife is all about. I mean, it's a sobering thought, but the fact is over 10% of our class has passed away.

Magda: That's really surprising to me.

Doug: It is, and I think I told you, too, I went to my 35th reunion and had a great talk with a kid who I didn't hang out with much. Our parents knew each other. He lived near me. So we were just courteous to each other. We were in the same homeroom because his name was close to mine. He married late. He had young daughters who were like eight and six and was like, I can't believe it took this long. I knew I always wanted to be a dad. It's even better than I ever thought it would be. I'm so happy. I'm so centered. It's brought this new level of love and joy to my life. And then in three months, he had a heart attack and died.

Magda: Oh, that's horrible. I don't think we should have a lot of this in this episode.

Doug: Well, but I mean, I think it's not meant to depress people. It's meant to say that life is precious. I mean, going to reunions, to me, just reminds me of how great it is to be here and how great it is that we all got to be in one place together. You know, the idea of getting all together, I took that for granted in my 20s. But now getting a bunch of 50-year-olds in one place to celebrate what they knew 40 years ago, it's a miracle.

Magda: Yeah, but my point in all of this is that it's not to celebrate what you knew 40 years ago. It's to celebrate who you are now, regardless of who you were then.

Doug: Well, a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B. Yeah. And the best part is people get together to misremember stuff. They, you know, I'm sure half the details that I think I remember are completely wrong. And that's the beauty of it, too. You can kind of work together to piece together some kind of narrative through the misremembered thoughts of everybody involved. But yeah, you talk about kids, you talk about parents, and you're right. It is very universal.

Magda [Magda’s phone rings again!] Yeah. Oh, my God. Why are people calling me?

Doug: It's election season. “Have you made a voting plan yet?” I've gotten six calls from Democrats since we've been doing this podcast. I've been looking over.

Magda laughs: That's nuts.

Doug: Yeah.

Magda: All right. We got to wind this up.

Doug: Yes. Yes.

Magda: So are we urging people to go to their high school reunions? I do not go to my high school reunion.

Doug: I do.

Magda: I am in touch with a lot of people from my high school class that I really enjoy spending time with just on the daily, and make an effort to see them when I'm in the area. And I'm not urging people to go to their high school reunions, but I am urging people to reassess relationships that they had in the past that might be radically better now if you got to know those people now.

Doug: And even if you go and it's a horrid disaster, you know that, too.

Magda: You may be in a place where you feel like it's okay to spend an evening testing out to see if something's a horrid disaster. I kind of don't like to do that. I'd rather spend my time on something else.

Doug: I am so at home with bombing. Yes, I am fine with disasters. The other night I went to see a production of Ulysses.

Magda: Oh boy.

Doug: And it was just completely impenetrable.

Magda: Wow.

Doug: It had an intermission. It's a three-hour show. I didn't realize how long it was. It's a desk of six people and they're essentially performing it from the text. There's actually, there's a prompter of the actual text in the theater that you can follow along with if you want. And they fast forward and go back. There was an exodus of people who left during the intermission. 

Magda: Wow. 

Doug: I'm very curious to know how many people stuck it out for the second half because it was packed for the first half. But many, many people accompanied me out the door during the intermission. And I was like, you know what? I got there. I saw what I saw. And I'm not seeing any more. But I learned something. Failure. And I knew now that my brain is not equipped to parse Ulysses.

Magda: I mean, Ulysses, right? I mean, you lost me at “I went to see a production of Ulysses.”

Doug: I listened to a bunch of people saying words. They were saying words and getting laughs every so often, but I felt like I was in another country.

Magda: Mike and I are going to a charity showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show this coming Friday.

[Doug laughs]

Magda: And it is starting at, I think, 7 p.m., which is really our speed. And Mike confessed to me that he had never seen the entire movie because it always started at midnight. I was like, that is reason enough in your 50s to not have seen the end of the movie. [both laugh] And this is the time when we will be able to see the entire movie and talk about it before it's time for bed.

Doug: Well, and I'll leave you with this too. Now my algorithm is sending me nothing but actor flubs.

Magda: Oh, for Pete's sake.

Doug: And they're hilarious. I do laugh at them. And so there's one when Jodie Foster is filming Silence of the Lambs. And it's when she's trying to arrest Buffalo Bill. And she reaches out and points his gun and says, freeze, put your hands on your hips. [both laugh] So it was this very tense moment where she broke up. And I'm like, well, there's, what if Silence of the Lambs and the Rocky Horror Picture Show had a mashup? All right. Well, everybody, thank you for listening to Episode 61 of the When the Flames Go Up Podcast with Magda Pecsenye Zarin and me, Doug French.

Doug: Our guest has been reunions, like to a point, tangentially, and a bunch of other things. Rewind it and tell me what we talked about because I forgot half of it. When the Flames Go Up is a production of Halfway Noodles LLC and is available on all the usual platforms and at whentheflamesgoup.substack.com. Please subscribe there for our weekly episode every Wednesday and our newsletter every other Friday, Friday Flames. Be safe this week. Think about your next reunion. It's Homecoming season, so hopefully you're back there doing something fun. And we'll see you next week. Bye-bye.