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“That was the last tiether” Mr Welles said

After that, college, work and e separated you Suddenly you found yourself with soroup And you never felt as coain in all your life

“I wonder,” said Mr Welles “I like to think ht be the last we’d have You first get that eraduation Then, when a little time passes and no one vanished immediately, you relax But after a year you realize the old world is changing And you want to do so before you lose one another While you’re all still friends, hoe, you’ve got to have so like a last ride and a swim in the cool lake”

Mr Welles re under his father’s Ford, reaching up their hands to adjust this or that, talking about machines and woot warm At last Tom said, “Why don’t we drive out to Druce’s Lake?”

As simple as that

Yet forty years later, you re up the other fellows, everyone yelling under the green trees

“Hey!” Alec beating everyone’s head with the pu “This is for extra sandwiches, later”

Nick had arlic kind they would eat less of as the years passed and the girls moved in

Then, squeezing three in the front, three in the rear, with their arh the boiling, dusty countryside, with a cake of ice in a tin washtub to cool the beer they’d buy

&nbs

p; What was the special quality of that day that it should focus like a stereoscopic ie, fresh and clear, forty years later? Perhaps each of them had an experience like his own A few days before the picnic, he had found a photograph of his father twenty-five years younger, standing with a group of friends at college The photograph had disturbed hi of time, the swift flow of the years away from youth A picture taken of hie to his own children as his father’s picture did to hie, never-returning time

Was that how the final picnic had co that in a few short years they would be crossing streets to avoid one another, or, if they ot to have lunch so it? Whatever the reason, Mr Welles could still hear the splashes as they’d plunged off the pier under a yellow sun And then the beer and sandwiches underneath the shady trees

We never ate that purier, we’d have cut it up, and I wouldn’t have been reminded of it by that loaf there on the counter

Lying under the trees in a golden peace that came from beer and sun and male companionship, they promised that in ten years they would meet at the courthouse on New Year’s Day, 1920, to see what they had done with their lives Talking their rough easy talk, they carved their names in the pumpernickel

“Driving hoht Bay’”