After Hours

Making time for people you care about

Putting together the invitation for our annual holiday open house, I am already jumping the gun. I’m giving the date to our guests when I see or talk to them, advising them to come early and stay late.

This is not just exuberant hospitality—it’s the anticipatory delight of spending a bit of quiet time with the first party guests to arrive or the hearty souls who stay late, catching up while cleaning up. These stolen conversations are my favorites, free of the noisy reverie and repeated interruptions that occur mid-party. They of course can’t happen without the joyful noise of all the other conversations I look forward to happening around and between.

But these stolen conversations remind me of another party tradition that ran deep in my family. We had an after-party practice known as “rehash” where a small group, maybe one couple, stayed behind for an unplanned after party with my folks. With the dishes done (or undone), they’d recap the party’s highlights, trade the news and the gossip they collected. These sessions became so storied that the daughter of my mom’s best friend nearly delayed departing from her own wedding for fear of missing out on a great rehash.

I was delighted to learn from my wife, Kate, that her family had a similar tradition. With cousins in Bermuda, the family’s home lived within sight of the airport where they could watch visiting guests depart by plane. Once the landing gear retracted, the “wheels up” conversation could begin.

This wasn’t about petty gossip or hurtful comments held at bay – this was about making memories of good times shared and friendship sustained, deepening the enjoyment through repetition.

With these rich traditions in mind, I recently experienced what I believe to be a variation on the theme which I now call “After Hours.”

“After hours” occurs when you’ve spent time with friends and already covered “the news”: the professional and family updates, what’s going on in your respective social lives or particular challenges of the moment. That’s when the extra time spent together allows what’s really going on to surface or to bring to mind a reminiscence that has recently come back to make a point. It can also just be enjoying with a little more time and space the company of someone with whom you share a bond, a closeness that doesn’t always require a name.

I am reminded of the quote often attributed to George Eliot, but actually written by Dinah Maria Muloch Craik in her 1859 novel, A Life for a Life.

“Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.”

If “wheels up” conversations can create memories, time spent “after hours” can deepen even the best of friendships.

A recent “after hours” trip occurred after a group dinner with high school friends. Having spent time catching up with other friends at dinner, my friend, Amy, and I planned an impromptu visit to a friend’s house who recently abandoned the DMV for a farm in West Virginia. With the benefit of an all day trip, we could catch up at length and lean into the our time together. I learned more about Amy’s life in early retirement, how much she is enjoying travelling, reading, spending time with grandkids, while providing lots of support to ailing family members and friends.

We traded book titles and talked a lot about our friendships, which friendships had faded and who we were still connected to. I shared my ambition to perhaps write a book about friendship someday. Amy will likely have a chapter. She has been a fixture since we dated for six weeks in eighth grade. She offered her observations on how our shared friendships had started in childhood and evolved over the years, with most retaining that quality of being able to pick up a conversation as if no time had passed at all, in relationships anchored in love, deep trust and shared experience, often from many years passed.

At the end of an annual guys’ weekend, my forever friend Patrick and I added an extra day of “after hours” before returning to Boston. Patrick wanted to visit a couple from college days and invited me to be his wingman. Of course, we did a “rehash” of the dinner, as I heard new stories about Patrick’s college exploits told by his college roommate. After many years of friendship, I finally got some new material!

The After Hours continued the next day when we took a rainy windshield tour around old Louisville, stopping for a long lunch before heading to the airport. Our conversation moved easily from sports to politics, to updates about work and home. It also gave us time to ask the big questions: “What relationships have become important to you?” “Where do you want to spend the next years of your life and what do you want to be doing?”

But the highlight of the visit was telling each other how important our friendship was, how much we counted on each other and how thankful we were to be in each other’s lives. My guess is that these are rare conversations for men to have as we are socialized early on to hide our feelings for fear of being vulnerable or appearing weak. We are trained to leave things unsaid or even unexamined. After hours brought these feelings to the surface where they found a voice.

As this year’s holiday party approaches, I am already imagining both the stolen conversations with the first arrivals, and the “rehash” with those who stay late, looking forward to future visits and “after hours” conversations of the coming year.

Do you hold on to the memory of a great rehash, or look forward to a lingering conversation each year? Let me know in the comments about your own “after hours” moments!