When I was in middle school, the town recreation department hosted dances on Friday nights. Actually that’s pretty solipsistic (even for me) so let me try that again: for a period of time, the beginning and ending of which I honestly couldn’t pinpoint, the town recreation department in my New Jersey ‘burb hosted Friday night dances at the American Legion hall. They started and ended at reasonable hours and were pretty strictly chaperoned by a combination of police and concerned parents, so there wasn’t any underage smoking or drinking or experimental heavy-petting or fighting or anything much beyond hanging out, perhaps buying off-brand sodas for 50 cents at the concession stand, and actual dancing. (By which of course I mean the girls would dance to every song and the boys would only maybe dance to some of the slow songs if certain stars aligned.) Clearly this was incredibly milquetoast which is why I consider this another middle school memory; by high school, kids had moved on to other things, but in the weird borderlands of sixth through eighth grade it was the closest thing to an independent social life we could cultivate, and I did so pretty faithfully. It was kind of boring and repetitive, and in middle school most of the girls were taller than me which made slow-dancing excruciatingly awkward, but for three years Friday night was Rec Dance night.
In high school I was in the marching band, and by then Little Bro had started playing Pop Warner, so Friday night became significantly more football-oriented. I feel compelled to point out that my high school was possessed of a spectacularly dismal football record, and as my wife always reminds me, we Jerseyans didn’t take football as seriously as places like Mississippi and Texas in the first place anyway (our high school graduation was on the actual football field on a June evening, and the girls were allowed to walk on the grass in high heels; apparently this is unspeakably taboo in gods-honest Friday Night Lights country) but again – small town, not much else going on, I ended up where everyone else was.
Before I move on to college, I’m going to equate Friday nights to pizza, which is yet another thing I’m sure I have in common with approximately 50 million other people, but I’ll at least mention the peculiarities of my family in particular. Little Bro and I were distressingly picky eaters growing up, and about the only break we gave our mom was that we both had pretty similar likes and dislikes. We both refused to eat any kind of fish and 90% of all vegetables. Mom’s a meat-and-potatoes type herself (as was her mother, rest her soul, who pretty much ate cheap cuts of beef fried in a frying pan for dinner every day until she died at a ripe old age) so me and my brother’s food aversions weren’t that calamitous … until Lent rolled around every year and my mom had to figure out what to do for dinner on Friday nights. (All fascination with heathen pantheons from Scandinavia to India aside, I grew up really devoutly Catholic.) A nice cheese pizza was obviously the path of least resistance for a meat-free dinner, but of course mom’s life couldn’t be that simple. My dad hated having pizza for dinner. I think this stemmed from a combination of a couple of things: he worked in Manhattan and probably had pizza for lunch sometimes and saw other people having it for lunch more or less every single day, and in his mind it was cheap junk food. My dad also harbored the delusion that he had married his own mother and was thus going find a three-or-four-course meal piping hot and set on the table when he got home from work every evening. (The question is not “why did my parents get divorced”; the question is “how did they stay together for nineteen years”.) In any case, over Dad’s objections, Mom ordered pizza on Lenten Fridays pretty often and when Little Bro and I got somewhat older and had to come home from school, eat a quick dinner, and get back out to a dance or a football game or whatever, pizza became a default Friday night option year-round. My wife and I both love pizza, including making homemade versions and ordering in, and the pies-as-complete-meal-option seem to gravitate toward Friday nights even still.
(One more note about pizza that has nothing to do with Friday: if Mom asked me and Little Bro what we wanted for dinner, and we said pizza, we knew we would usually get it. If Dad asked because he was in charge of dinner, as occasionally happened, we knew better than to ask for pizza every time. But when we were staying with Dad’s mom, if she asked us what we wanted for dinner, we’d ask for pizza and she would not just acquiesce but get excited. She would sincerely gush over each slice: “This is wonderful! I’m so glad you boys thought of this! Your grandfather and I never even think to order pizza, but I love it!” And I think I knew this was much to the chagrin of her son, my father, even before I knew what the word “chagrin” meant. Grandma still cracks me up.)
Having given more than enough attention to alcoholic binges this week already, I will skip that obvious collegiate Friday connection and proceed to another: traversing I-95. At first I was going to say “the road trip” but I stopped myself as I realized that’s really not what I’m getting at. Road trips are automotive expressions of the classic “it’s the journey, not the destination” sentiment, and thus the best road trips are often characterized by serendipitous side-excursions to see mutant six-legged cows or whatnot. I’ve made my share of those kind of road trips, and don’t get me wrong, I love them, but I don’t associate them with Fridays, per se. Friday night is a time for getting in the car, aiming it directly at a specific and familiar Point B, and covering the distance from starting Point A as fast as possible. In general, if I’m going somewhere for the weekend, I like to wake up on Saturday morning and already be there. Thus, I was forever opting to devote Friday night to the necessary travel time. Better by far to pull up to the curb at Mom’s house in the wee hours of the night, collapse into bed in the guest room, and take on Saturday first thing in the morning, than to put off the trip and waste half of Saturday on the extremely boring black ribbon that is the East Coast’s primary Interstate.
That became especially true when I started dating my wife, a relationship which for several months was conducted long-distance. I would leave from work on Friday evening and endure what felt at the time like definitively the world’s worst traffic on I-95 South, and get to her place hours and hours later despite only having driven a little less than a hundred miles. But given the choice between that scenario or not getting to see her until Saturday, it was totally worth it, never even a question.
So yeah. Adolescent social events, high school football and marching bands, college travel plans and fraternity speak-easies (though never in the same night), a high-milage love affair, and pizza. Friday’s pretty good in my book.
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