The Raw, the Cooked, and the Difference between Them A case study of two politically distinct people who could not make it to the entrée.

Three miles from the river, the traffic stopped so hard I thought I might plow into a fuel tanker. I braked and watched my rearview to see if someone would hit me from behind. The road surface was covered in clothing: wadded-up shirts, pants doing the splits, small mounds of clothes in motley colors and patterns, a few mismatched shoes in the lanes and on the shoulder.

Inching along, watching cars rolling over the clothes, gave me a bad feeling I could not place, until I realized it looked like a massacre site, that I was looking for bodies that were not there. A mile on, the clothing had thinned, and far below, on a cloverleaf, an 18-wheeler with a cop car behind it was partially blocking traffic, but it was impossible to know if it had caused the accident or if it even was an accident. Surprise and unknowing had become common.

Alex had made the reservation for 6:15 pm but told me we would meet “6:15 to 6:30.” Before 6:15, I texted that traffic was bad, and she replied, “No worries!!! Table in the back.” The restaurant was in an affluent suburb beyond the city. I finally got past the blockage and drove too fast, but by Alex’s “6:15” I was more than 20 minutes late.

She rose from the tiny table for two and hugged me.

“Sorry,” she said over her shoulder to another couple.

“No problem,” the man said without looking up.

I apologized to Alex and told her about the clothes. The way she listened, mouth in an O and eyes wide, made me want to downplay it, which made me sound merely thoughtless.

It was our third dinner in six months. Each time I had gently requested something more informal—a pho kitchen, or the oyster bar near the stadium—but Alex did not seem to understand or was unwilling to go below a certain level. I had tried to game it this time by suggesting pizza, but she picked the pizza place owned by that relaxed bistro she had taken us to the first time, which had osso buco on the menu and a 26-page wine list.

I was a bit underdressed in jeans, running shoes, and a hoodie with a cat on it. I did not go looking for trouble, though maybe I hoped to adjust expectations. As it turned out, she and I both had some beliefs preloaded that night.

•  •  •

We often say things like, Alex and I had known each other our whole lives. What that turns out to mean is that we grew up in the same small town and were friends in high school and just after. Her boyfriend in high school was a great guy and a friend of mine, but he was a year or two older than us, and Alex used to ask me advice about their relationship and call me her “sex therapist.” That confused me some. What I did not know about sex, let alone relationships, would not have fit in the Mississippi River. It also seemed like emotional betrayal, but I did not think she was interested in me.

Her first boyfriend in college was a kid they called Lumpy, and she did not ask me for advice about him. I had been admitted to the same university but had no money, so I was away in the army. She gifted me a novel about a guy who dearly loved a woman but wanted to have adventures and went off to climb mountains and became one of the best mountaineers in the world but there was an accident and he became a drunk in Nepal and cavorted in a yeti suit for tourists until one day the grown son he did not know that he had by that woman showed up in Kathmandu to climb mountains with him and with the son of his best friend, a Sherpa who had died in the accident. Obviously the book was terrific, but I was confused again about her view of me. I was in the army because I was poor and hoped to use the state to get back to school and on track with my life.

Alex graduated college in the mid-1980s and moved to St. Louis. I flew through once, on my way back to my duty station in Panama. She picked me up, bought me an expensive dinner with spirits, wine, and dessert, and had me crash on her couch. I remember that when she saw me off, her father, a real estate and insurance guy who lived in our hometown two hours away, was at the airport too for some reason and seemed glad to see me go.

Soon after I got back to Panama, someone I knew disappeared on a field exercise, and I wrote a journal about it in the form of a letter to Alex. I did not mail it but gave it to her eventually, as a curiosity. Then we lost touch, for decades.

Over the years I heard Alex became a Chief Financial Officer of a big corporation, that she lived in distant cities but spent time on a hobby farm she owned in the southern half of our county, that she had kids, that her husband was in business too. Confusingly, the same people who told me those things also said no one ever heard from her. (When people in a small town speak of a local who left, they often imply the person thought they were better than the town. I suspect it is almost never true.)

In 2023 I was asked to do a talk at our hometown library, and some classmates came up afterward and told me how much Alex had wanted to come. One asked me to sign a book to her, and in the inscription I teased Alex about not being there.

A year and a half later, I got a message through LinkedIn from someone whose name I did not instantly recognize. “John, I would love to have lunch or dinner to catch up. It’s been too long!!” it said.

I clicked through to the user profile, which had just four connections, no photo, and the biographical summary “mom at home.” It looked like a bot, but I remembered it was Alex’s married name. Just in case, I replied that it was nice to hear from her, gave her my email address, and said I would be available later in the month.

It was Alex. “I am relieved that you are so receptive to meeting,” she emailed. “I want to apologize for not attending your event…. I was not in a good place at that time but should have powered through and been there. I am ashamed that I wasn’t there to support you and celebrate your accomplishments. Forgive me.”

Ashamed? Forgive?

“O lord, unburden yourself of all that and don’t think of it again,” I replied. “My book was old, and the lecture was a favor to the library. I didn’t know anybody would show up, let alone you.”

Our first dinner was at the bistro with the long wine list, 45-minutes through the city in a rough week. As I was parking I told my friend Larry on the phone about Alex’s emails and wondered if I should have postponed. After all, I said, “If an actual stranger had said today, ‘Drive all the way out here and I’ll buy you a meal,’ I wouldn’t have come.”

Larry laughed. “What if they told you, ‘We’re going to work out on you emotionally with a bunch of bullshit’?” he said.

I was relieved to recognize Alex immediately. She had dyed her hair like British ladies used to do to look like Princess Di and wore a pretty sheath dress. I had dressed up a little, and as we sat down, we looked like a nice older couple. The waiter asked our occasion. Alex said my name to him with a big smile and explained we were old friends who have not seen each other in ages. It was the kind of place where he did his professional part to stretch dinner to nearly four hours.

I had told Alex we should go somewhere we could hear each other, but I was straining at the start. So, what’s going on? I said, leaning forward, trying to keep the decades light and to let her begin as she wished.

She asked me instead to tell her about my thrilling adventures as a soldier and a military diver, 40 years earlier. I laughed and recapped briefly then said, I got to do some things, for sure. I tried to get to more recent events, but she had brought the spiral-bound letter-journal I had written in 1986. She placed her hand on it as she spoke, as if it were an originalist document, and begged me not to take it back.

No, no, I said, it’s okay, I don’t need it back.

Her eyes welled a little, and she said, You can take it back if you really need to take it back.

I had begun remembering things and reminded her that she and I made a copy of it in her dad’s office the day I gave it to her. I said my most recent book had an essay in it that used details from the letter-journal and that I had brought her a copy. She looked at the book as if I had given her my cloth napkin to take home. She said she had only skimmed my book about our hometown that I had inscribed to her before.

She had two or three big bags with handles on the seat next to her. They worried me a little. She started to reach into them several times but stopped. We talked, and finally she pulled from one of them an envelope the army used to give trainees to write home during basic training. She said I had written her from basic and that she had saved the letter.

How kind of you, I said. Going in the army had been self-exile for me, and I wrote people to try to stay connected. She seemed emotional as she pulled the letter from the envelope but did not show it to me, even when I asked to see it. She said I wrote that her father had not helped me. I apologized and said I did not remember writing that and did not know why I ever would have thought he had a responsibility to help me.

No one helped, I said, simply stating the obvious, except the couple I called my other parents, to the degree they could. I had to do it myself. She claimed not to have known my troubles as a teen, though I was underweight and probably smelled bad, and she said she always thought my dad died in Vietnam, when the whole town knew he had left us. She said I should have gotten the college scholarship the town gave to her, but I was maybe seventh in my class, so that made no sense.

I turned the conversation again to her. She said she had lost contact with everyone from the old days and felt terrible about it. Tonight would be the start of building back, she said; things had changed. There was too much mystery in that, so I said mutual friends had told me she was a corporate CFO and smiled. She only looked at me. They said you had acronyms, CFO, COO, CEO, after your name, I said. She looked at me as if she was wearing VR goggles that had glitched. Finally, I did the thing that is not my best thing.

What have you done with your life? I said comically, intending to cut through the knot, expecting her to laugh and open up. After all, she had invited me out.

At the expression on her face, I felt instant shame. She said she had not really done anything. Her husband had been the one in the C-suites, she said, at corporate restaurant chains that traded on the image of down-home American food. She said she had been only a stay-at-home mom, but, working at home as a homemaker is a huge job, she said. I agreed. She hosted a prayer group at her house once a week and liked to bake things for the women. She missed Connecticut and made a humble joke about how people there used to recognize they lived in only the second-richest town on the commuter line from NYC.

I continued to listen. Actually she had worked in her field for 15 years after college and more recently served on boards for things like the botanical garden. For almost 40 years, to the present day, she worked for her father’s business. She was not paid for it, she said, or even treated well by him; she had been his favorite child but was cut out of his will after her beloved mother died and he got involved with that woman who poisoned him slowly with arsenic. After he died (of other causes) she discovered he was a million dollars in debt. Our former coal town still has an individual median income of only $35,000. I said surely she was not liable for that, but she said she had been listed as his business manager, and, The state can pierce the trust veil. Her brothers were no help.

Alex told me her dad owned 40 houses when he died. I was shocked, and my first thought was a pun:  the widows and orphans homes. Alex was selling houses to pay the debt.

The main problem—and, I suspected, the real reason for the dinner request—was her marriage. She had learned something shocking about Luke recently and was still shaken, in the way that looks like a reaction to physical violence. I guessed infidelity and hoped it was not abuse. She had been to see a lawyer that day, went shopping, and came to dinner. She had many questions for me about divorce and post-divorce life, such as whether I would date someone our age.

She reminded me that 20 years earlier, when I ran into her at the university where I taught, she had a meal with me and my wife, which I had forgotten. She said she gave us a baby gift, that I never acknowledged it, and then never heard from me again. I apologized but thought of the relatively large online presence I had all those years, making it easy to contact me.

Luke was retired, and Alex said their age difference had not seemed like a big deal before, but now he seemed old to her. She showed me a photo of him on her phone, a mild-looking guy, bald like me, also sitting in a restaurant, maybe even this restaurant. He was worth a bundle, she said. (His shares from three companies he worked for were worth multi-millions, I saw later.) I said to take care of herself in the divorce; I knew someone who left with nothing, just to get free, and regretted it. Alex said Luke would pay, believe me, and she looked forward to starting over.

But she did not have a plan for starting over. She said she might buy a condo in another state to be close to their only child, who was grown and working. She was not a reader but talked a little about streaming shows she watched. She had traveled with her father to Europe, at some point. She kept coming back to the army stuff, and sharks, and how she never would have had the courage to do what I did.

She carried a gun in her purse, and I was curious why. We discussed the city of St. Louis versus where she lived in the county, a conversation that necessarily touched on race. I brought up the guy who had bought up some 700 buildings in North St. Louis, on 150 different blocks, and was often blamed for its extreme blight. By the way she looked at me I wondered if she knew him personally, and she said a lot of people said it was worse down there than in the slums of Africa.

Uh-oh, I thought.

She would be voting for Trump, she said, Because immigration and entitlement are my issues. To be conciliatory, I said I was driving to Chicago to cover the DNC soon but was not big on Harris. She said she did not particularly like him but could not STAND her. She was a devoted enemy of vaccines, and I let that pass too.

She was in pain, so I listened. We had known each other our whole lives, after all, and here was my childhood friend, valedictorian or salutatorian of our class, who graduated summa cum laude from the flagship university where I later taught. We had played instruments together, had been educated together, once knew many of the same people, and had hung out. She showed me the Godfather movies in her living room. I had known her parents, and now all four of our parents were in their graves, and we were parents of grown children. We lived in the same metropolitan area. Why would it not be pleasant to sit together and imagine the futures that remained in each of our separate lives?

Just as she had done in the ’80s, she encouraged me to eat up and to drink alcohol, though she did not drink. The check was nearly $200, a large sum for me, but I said, Let me at least split it with you. She said with her old catty smile, No, Luke’s paying for this. I laughed and said that was not exactly what I meant before. She did not register it as funny.

As we were getting ready to leave, she reminded me that I had written in the letter-journal about looking into a lighted room and feeling apart from its warmth and fellowship. I did not know why she brought it up. In recent years I had found more active metaphors, such as being a pirate, a free-floating gentleman, the last great American whale. Outside the restaurant Alex asked if we could do this again. I said, Of course, and she hugged me and said I made her feel more like herself than she had in a long time.

•  •  •

Our second dinner was at a bar-restaurant in the city that served food on planks. Alex was late, so I sat on a stool at the bar and read. When she came in she did not give me the chance to get up and tried to hug me from behind. I tried to turn quickly and hug her and somehow wound up gripping a big handful of her hair somewhat roughly as we made la bise.

Over dinner I asked if Luke knew she was there.

Yes! she said, laughing. In fact, he says hello. She had not thought to tell me that. Let’s do this every month, she said.

We had a pleasant meal and conversation, though I remember being disturbed that her idea of connecting with me over literature was to send me an article on Ray Bradbury from The Epoch Times.

By the time we finished dinner it was dark and getting late, and I asked if she wanted me to walk her to her car. She did. Mostly we discussed the gun in her purse again, and she said she did not know how to use it very well. She hugged me goodbye before we got to her car door, a little nervously it seemed. I did not want to give Alex the wrong impression—my feelings were elsewhere—and thought we probably needed to have a more open conversation soon.

•  •  •

Weeks passed, and I sent Alex and others a link to a crowdfunding page I made, with hopes to go abroad to cover a historical event. It was the first time I had done such a thing. As soon as I sent her the link I regretted it and decided not to complicate things by taking money from her. Sometime later she emailed and said she wanted to help—I have to think about how much—and that we would discuss it at our next dinner.

I talked to her on the phone after she canceled that third dinner the second time. It had started to feel like thoughtlessness, but she said she had been busy because she had started working two days a week for an election-related company, looking for waste, canceling things, and collecting what was owed—nothing bad, she swore. She acted out alarm when I said I had decided not to go on my trip and would be returning all donations.

I was going to give you a thousand dollars! she cried.

That’s very generous of you, I said, though her offer came too late, even if I had wanted her help. I told her I would explain next time I saw her, at the pizza place.

We sat down between the other couples. Again the waiter was hyper-professional. I ordered the sausage, ricotta, and giardiniera pizza. Alex told the waiter she was a salad girl but ordered the white lasagna and a salad for us to split. Again she suggested I drink. I ordered a beer, and the waiter asked if I would like to see the can. I laughed.

She was shaken and a bit angry that county clerks around the country had been yelling at her for phoning to collect on two-year-old, overdue payments to her employer. She said the company had “thousands” of these accounts collectible. I asked how they were still in business, and she said they were making money hand over fist. She got the job through a connection, and when I asked if she took it in order to prep for being on her own, she said, Yes. It was a revelation to be around people, she said, especially young people, who did not have the social cues she expected.

I told her my younger son and I had gone to the gun range earlier that day, and she lit up, because she was going to a range the next day. I said we went because my younger son wanted to experience shooting for the first time. We tried a couple of 9mm’s, a .38, and an AR clone.

Alex said her gun was a .38. She talked about its terrible recoil but wanted to keep up with shooting it, because you never know. She said she had done a “gals with guns” event and shot a machine gun there. She said her brother, a professional sniper, had modded an AR and insisted she take it, but it never got used.

I said that I was not exactly a pacifist, but I had never owned a gun and had never intended to and took some pride in that. I said when I became emperor I would put a giant electro-magnetic in the sky and take all the guns. It was my standard line, but I could tell it worried her. I admitted our times had me thinking about a Glock 19, which fit my grip and shot well with my cross-dominant hand and eye. I had heard good things about the Gen5.

She pried a little into my relationship with my elder son and insisted my younger son would benefit from majoring in business, that’s how to make money. I said my kids were great, and we were all doing fine.

She said she felt my trip abroad was for a reason, something was going to come of it, and I should go. She had her checkbook in her purse: I can write you a check right now! I was not so mean as to explain what she obviously skipped in my request: I had been invited to imbed with a bunch of old lefties, NGO staffers, and academics—some of whom had worked in Vietnam despite and even against the U.S. war—as they toured the country on the 50^th anniversary of its reunification.

I said there were multiple considerations in my decision, including my elderly cat’s health, and some degree of job uncertainty due to the administration going after universities. Despite crowd-sourcing and my publication paying airfare, I would have to pay a lot for the trip, which would not be wise if there was a chance I might get laid off. She dismissed it outright: It will all be fine. I explained that my employer was on the hit list of dozens of American universities being investigated by the administration for violations of the Civil Rights Act. She blinked in some form of disagreement.

I explained that cuts made by the administration to the NIH and other sources of medical research funding would also be felt by universities known for research and teaching hospitals. If the university had to shrink to its core values, as it called them, I might turn out not to be one.

She snarled at the size of my university’s endowment, a figure she knew to the tenth of one percent. (I had to look it up later.) She said it could always tap those billions to cover any shortfall. I explained that the uni had chosen not to do that in the pandemic. I said I was also a finalist for the Fulbright but would never know if I got it, as the program had been frozen by DOGE. I was an alternate in a previous year and did not go then.

To all this Alex said, Something has to be done about the deficit, and there are going to be some setbacks.

My employment, financial well-being, and once in a lifetime professional opportunity were collateral damage. I added that if I lost my job—that’s not going to happen—and Trump crashed the market—I talked to a market guy; he’s not going to crash the market—or damaged my 401k with a recession that I might not have time to recover from, and if Social Security got messed with—the president is simply not going to mess with Social Security—so that all sources of income for myself and other older people were choked off, she would find me at the head of a phalanx of a great geezer army in the street. I meant it as a joke but did not like her snicker of dismissal.

She came back to how she really felt my trip was meant to be, it had a reason, and I should go, anyone could see that. Trying hard to speak neutrally, I said, People who are financially secure might not see it the same way as those who are not.

Now she could have her say.

USAID was full of criminals; Biden used it to funnel two billion dollars to Stacey Abrams, who admitted it, that is on record.

I said that was not true. Alex gasped.

CDC, NIH, they are all corrupt, and DOGE found hundreds of billions in fraud, there was so much criminal corruption. All this corruption and deficit could not go on as it has been, the country wouldn’t survive.

I was sagging but forked Romaine lettuce into my mouth. None of that is true.

Clinton fired 300,000 people, what’s the difference with DOGE?

Big ones, it turns out.

Biden mismanaged COVID and created the vaccine hoax.

Ohh, that’s right, I said softly, to myself. You’re a vaxxer.

She was intent I get it right.

No, I know, I mean, vax stuff is your thing, I said. Anti-vaxxer, sorry.

She raised her voice. She had a book at home full of proof that mRNA testing had killed all those ferrets. For a second, I was interested. I did not remember the ferrets, and I wondered why so many tropes in the movement were unintentionally comic: swine dewormer as the cure, dicta from a golden toilet, Musk as synonym for reek. I said I thought that if I had my laptop I could find a report that the ferrets (weasels?) thing was inaccurate. She was astonished and said I could not. (Here it is.)

I was feeling trapped. I was in a flood-the-zone-with-shit scenario.

Alex said, Oh, this isn’t bothering you that much, is it? Your face is so red.

I have flushed easily all my life and dislike when people try to belittle me with it. Alex might have even remembered that. I said I was warm in my hoodie.

Don’t you agree with me? she demanded.

No, I said. I kept looking off, chewing my salad, sipping my beer, hoping it would stop. It did not stop. The bullying, proselytizing, pre-emptive-strike aspect was Bannon’s thing: flood the zone, keep punching, never let them up. But if you were just trying to develop relationships and live your life, an everyday believer was like a recovered alcoholic who had been lying in wait to proselytize AA, even if you did not drink. AA might be his salvation, which meant it was his method, spirituality, worldview, but if you were not an alcoholic, you did not know what to do with it. There was no point in your investment, because it did not provide mental, physical, financial, or other dividends.

For everyday believers MAGA was a compulsion, like needing to be rid of oral pain. It was also a kind of triumph of democracy; they could speak as a king, without regard, without cease, without concern for other belief systems, such as empiricism. When they said, Freedom, it was bigly what they earned.

It was the age of assertion.

I hoped to mollify Alex long enough to get to dessert by explaining that I tried professionally to hear and consider many different points of view, in order to write better. I understood where she was coming from; I had read and listened to the media she was paraphrasing. But I also heard other views on those same issues, and in the end I had to make my own stand. at credible sources and serious analysis.

She got madder and said she read all sorts of things too and knew reality. She said she read The New York Times; they were liars and a liberal mouthpiece.

I said the Times got complaints because it is slower than social media, but journalism needs to confirm facts and statements. Others think the Times is too irrelevant to ever serve as a mouthpiece, even for cultural liberalism. Others say the Times normalizes and dignifies highly unusual, even illegal political events, and so aids fascism.

I told Alex, We come from very different places, which was a funny thing to say.

She was shocked. She shouted she could not believe what she was hearing.

I felt as if I had spent a month at the pizza joint that night, yet we had only gotten through our salads. She was still talking. I was too miserable to look at what diners around us were doing; if I had, I feared I might say, Hey, eat your Alfredo, pal.

I did not know I was going to do it until the waiter brought my pizza. I had never done such a thing in my life, even in the worst social situations, even ones I had thought might result in violence. I was going to walk out on someone. Thinking it made me feel better.

I asked the waiter, Hey, could you do me a favor and put this pizza in a box and bring me the check?

Alex shouted, O no you’re not, I can’t believe this, and (to him), You give ME the check, he is NOT paying for this dinner.

The waiter retreated. I hoped she would tip him well. I did not have any cash. Alex squirmed in rage and said she could not believe it. She was saying this proved her right. I did not know who she was talking to. She had forgotten to say the old saw, So much for the tolerant left.

No, it proves me right, I said, good-naturedly enough to get me shot with a purse gun.

My pizza came back in a box, which the waiter set on the stand between us. I put my hand on top of it and said, I’m going to take this home and eat it and enjoy it. Thank you for dinner.

Alex asked loudly, Why are you doing this?

Because I’m 61 years old, and I don’t have to do this, I said. I had been working with someone on boundaries. She was very good.

I stood and took my coat from the back of my chair. Alex was so angry she put her fork to her white lasagna, which lay on her plate like a great dead fish, as if she were going to eat it right then.

Outside the rooms of the restaurant the sun was still shining, and the air was spring crisp. Why do we expect that people we knew in kindergarten will, after entire lives of careers, marriages, partnerships, friendships, children, labor, study, houses, cities, cars, pets, sports, entertainment, travel, accomplishments, pleasures, pain, and losses, come back into our lives easily or necessarily? That different people starting in one place will arrive in congruent ones? Alex said her health was good, and she had all the money and time in the world. I wished her nothing but happiness, but I would not know of it.

The names in this essay have been changed.