The note I left by the coffee maker every Friday morning read, “Coffee with the guys.” This was to remind Judy where I was if she slept in a bit. Each Friday morning, a gathering of 4, 5, or 6 showed up at a downtown coffee shop at 7:30. One drank tea and one often drank nothing as he was already “coffeed up” from being awake for several hours tending a dog with a chronic disease. But I called it coffee time anyway. 

We were all retired, sort of. Three of us were fully retired, our jobs now consisting of doing the needed things around the house, pursuing hobbies, and volunteering at some of the same places. One was retired from a long career but was now running a store he and his wife had owned for 10 years. He’s trying to sell it and fully retire. One in the group hasn’t yet grasped the concept of retirement. He’s trying to line up his third or fourth post-retirement job mostly to keep himself busy. The youngest of us finished a long career in journalism and is now teaching English and literature to 6th graders at a local school, something the rest of us agree we could never do.

The group’s beginning was simple. Two of us got together for coffee one Friday morning a couple of years ago and agreed that we liked it. Slowly we began inviting another and another until we got to the size that seemed to work well. And it does work well for reasons hard to define. We didn’t grow up together or go to school together. We didn’t work together or play on a team together. Most of us have known each other fewer than ten years. We have gotten to know each other as “70-somethings,” though one has not yet crossed that 7-decade threshold.

We share some things in common, though not the kinds of things you usually think of as commonalities for men, such as similar careers or golf or fishing or politics. The group does include golfers, fishermen, and lots of interest in politics, but that’s not what brings us together. Our backgrounds include oil executive, rancher, psychologist, journalist, school superintendent, mortician, and physician. That’s not counting the varied part-time jobs and short-term careers along the way, which yield some good stories every Friday. We’ve lived all over the place and we each got to Abilene, or back to Abilene, from different directions. 

It’s hard to say what keeps us showing up, but from my own experience, over the months I went from enjoying the gathering, to looking forward to it, to depending on it. Good routines are like that. Given time they become life-renewing rituals.

P.S. I am writing this from my new home in Illinois. I moved away from Abilene and toward my kids. The Friday morning group is one of the things I miss most.