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Familiar Laugh is
a Time Machine
H. G. Wells knocked on my front door Sunday morning and when I opened it the pages of the calendar flipped backward, months, years, four decades in all, in an instant.
Greeting me was my college roommate from freshman year. In 2019, I was 18 again.
Fingerprint analysis could not have been more accurate in identifying Matt than the proof provided by his smile. Father Time may have stolen his bushy, dark curls and added lines of wisdom to his countenance, but his grin was as broad and radiant and familiar as ever.
In the only photograph I have of Matt, for there were no ubiquitous cell phone cameras always at the ready in 1978, he is flashing his trademark electric grin as sun-bleached-mop-haired me goofily flashes a peace sign of rabbit ears behind his head.
Goofing it up as UCSB freshmen with my roommate Matt Bell.
In my mind’s eye – rather, mind’s ear – there is something even more identifying than Matt’s smile: his laugh. DNA profiling could not be more precise for identification. It is a hall-of-fame laugh, part cackle, part music.
Matt freely played that music again Sunday morning and it was more wonderful than Cheap Trick and Tom Petty and Pink Floyd making our dorm widows rattle on a Friday night.
Words of hello being insufficient after so long apart, we promptly embraced on the front doorstep – perhaps for the first time ever because college roommates in the ’70s didn’t generally hug.
The next two hours passed like two minutes as we played catch-up on our lives, our long marriages, his three children and my two plus a granddaughter, our jobs – he’s a high school principal in Northern California – and on and on. The eggs and pancakes and coffee grew cold half-untouched because the air was so warm with conversation and memories and laughter.
It’s funny sometimes what memories pop to mind. Matt was on UC Santa Barbara’s gymnastic team and while I recall him being dizzying good on the rings and pommel horse, my favorite feat of his was when he walked the entire length of our dorm hallway on his hands while the rest of us cheered as though it was the Olympics.
Matt remembered stories I had forgotten and vice-versa. Most of them I dare not share in this space, but here’s one more that I will. I had sophomorically sabotaged his toothbrush with soap and Matt retaliated ingeniously by somehow putting a small measure of sunscreen inside my tube of Crest.
As I spit and rinsed, rinsed, rinsed, Matt guffawed. I squeezed away a third of the tube to get rid of the contaminated portion and started brushing again. Again, I gagged. This happened a third time as well.
By now Matty sounded like Muttley the cartoon dog. I believe it was the only time either of us got even halfway upset at the other – in truth, I think I was mad at myself for falling for the well-played prank over and over.
Now I’m mad at myself for falling out of touch with Matt after graduation. More so, however, I’m thankful for the miracle of social media that allowed us to reconnect after 37 years.
To give you one more snapshot of what a masterpiece reunion we had, and to further encourage you to reach out to a friend you may have lost contact with, Matt and I were so busy enjoying ourselves that we forgot to take a picture together. We plan to remedy that soon.
It has been said that it takes a long time to grow an old friend, but it can also happen over breakfast.
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FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn
Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.
Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …
- Personalized signed copies are available at WoodyWoodburn.com