They hadn’t changed a bit.
         Of course they had changed: They were grayer, and more reduced, and some of them had died. But in most respects it was the same old gang.
         I had been in Philadelphia a long time, working for the Treasury, but we got early retirement forced on us and now that Mary was dead and the kids had moved away I discovered a real dissatisfaction with the city. So I sold the house and most of everything and I moved back to Barleville.
         The house I grew up in was long gone, but there was a new senior living development not a mile away from the old place. I’m not a senior yet, I thought, but then again I meant to make my home here for the rest of my life, and I already had a little arthritis, and one of my friends (actually the older brother of one of my closest friends) was already living there, and so on. There were lots of reasons to get a jump on it.
         Tom (that’s my friend’s brother) arranged a nice welcome-home for me at a local restaurant. He couldn’t come himself (polymyalgia), but most of the other old faces were there. We ate burgers and fries and drank beer, and everybody said how they were going to pay for all of that in the morning.
         We laughed and caught up. What had they all been up to? Marriages, kids and grandkids, careers. It was interesting to see who had followed their dreams and who had settled. Who was happy.
         After the dinner, most everybody went home, but I took a walk through the old neighborhood with Gary (Tom’s brother) and Jeff. We were always the tightest, the three of us. They pointed out how things had changed. Mostly it was worse, they said, because of the city council. I didn’t know anything about local politics at the time. There was the empty lot where my grandparents’ house had been. There was the park we’d all played in: That was mostly unchanged, but there were tall apartment buildings on one side of it now that I figured would block the morning sun. It might still be okay in the afternoons though, after the kids were out of school.
         I went home at nine o’clock. Nine o’clock! When I was seventeen we hadn’t gotten started until then. But I ached. Back in my new apartment I sat on the mattress and went online to look through the Treasury website. They’d already erased my name and the names of most of my coworkers. The Reports page, where most of the work I’d done for thirty years had lived, was broken. The Mission and Core Values page was a disgrace.
         I ordered some household supplies. I googled Barleville and tried to catch up with what I’d missed. Fires, local scandals, civic events of all description. I googled my friends and found a few unsettling things I decided not to ask about. My apartment was right below Tom’s, and late into the night I could hear him restlessly moving around, limping and shuffling like an old man.
         In the morning it had snowed, and pretty heavily. Looking out the window I wondered who was responsible for clearing the sidewalks in front of the building. I turned up the thermostat and rubbed the NSAID cream on my ankles. My shoulderblades hurt too, but I couldn’t reach back there. I wasn’t at all hung over.
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