Naught girl summer, part 2

Or, what if we just hung out?

The cafe sign outside the Tower Station on Route 66 in Shamrock, Texas, speaks to my current feelings about entertaining and seeing friends. (P.S.: The cafe has an Art-o-Mat vending machine. Alas, they were closed when we dropped in back in March.)

I love throwing a dinner party. Picking a date and having a group of people over, setting a casually impressive table and cooking delectable things, arranging flowers and mixing a signature cocktail.

In summer, I might have you over for sun-dried-tomato-marinated grilled flank steak with the absolute best, most addictive pickled onions (both recipes are from my bestie Annette’s first cookbook, Picture Perfect Parties — trust me, you need this in your life). I might mix you a Lillet Spritz (1 part Lillet Blanc, 1 part sparkling wine, lemon and orange slices, plus mint sprigs). In the fall or winter, I’m likely to make a big pot of New Mexican posole and cinnamon margaritas, or this super simple and insanely delicious pork shoulder ragu from Jenny Rosenstrach’s Dinner, a Love Story, another fellow Substacker with a long-running, much loved blog and several cookbooks.

Most years, dinner parties are an evergreen pleasure for me. But in this, my summer of un-doing, I have realized that even things that typically bring joy — entertaining beautifully, showing guests you love them with special touches and effort — have their season. And for me, this isn’t the season. I have the same love for my friends, of course, but perhaps not the same level of energy just now.

The house is feeling all of its 120+ years and the list of maintenance chores has been weighing on me. This summer, my oldest is home from her first year in college. My second will follow soon enough. The overwhelm of it all has me craving quiet evenings in this nest of ours, as I feel the swells of a second wave of grief over its gradual emptying.

But also, the dinner party format feels altogether more structured than I’m in the mood for. 

What if we just hung out instead? 

Stop by some afternoon, I’ll pour you a glass of rosé or a London Fog iced tea¹ and we can sit on my semi-barren patio doing, well, not much of anything. Bring a book if you like, or your knitting bag, or nothing at all. Talk some, sit in silence some. Maybe I’ll bring out a bowl of potato chips or nuts, but also maybe eat before you come?

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Last week my teenage son asked if he could spend the afternoon with some friends. Despite my generational position and having had kids in the “planned playdate era,” I don’t consider myself a helicopter parent — but I admit that my first impulse was to ask him what they were going to do.

“I don’t know, just hang out,” he said.

To which I probably said something like, “But, I mean, what are you going to do? Where are you guys gonna go?”

And then I had to stop myself. As someone who grew up a full-on latchkey kid in the pre-cellphone days, someone who spent whole unsupervised weekends rollerskating through the neighborhood, someone who rode a Greyhound bus from Denver home to Santa Fe alone with her younger sister at age 11 or so, the words coming out of my mouth started to sound a little nuts.

I could have been asking out of a regular sense of curiosity about what he and his friends are into — I am genuinely curious about that — but what made me stop was the realization that at least part of what motivated the question was discomfort with the idea of unstructured time. (Hello, overachiever perfectionist tendencies and society’s obsession with productivity as a virtue.)

I do vaguely remember being a teenager a hundred years ago, and I know that some of my discomfort is the lived knowledge that just hanging out sometimes gets us up to trouble. But is there really anything inherently wrong with just hanging out? Exploring the unplanned, bouncing off each other and seeing what happens, where your whims or boredom take you.

In the end, I chuckled at myself and lobbed him a: “You know what, just hanging out is enough.”

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As if my phone were monitoring not only my voice and my search histories, but also my very brain waves as I’ve pondered the idea of doing less or doing less-defined things, I stumbled on this little nugget: a piece by Jancee Dunn from the NYT “Well” newsletter, titled “Why Don’t We Hang Out Anymore?” (Between this and the mention of reading out loud to each other that I noted a couple of weeks ago, Dunn and I are on the same adults-should-do-more-things-kids-do wavelength.) 

The short piece includes a number of interesting ideas for unconventional hangouts (check it out here), but this one in particular sticks with me: 

Sheila Liming, a professor and author of Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, drops by a friend’s house about once a week to hang out over a cup of tea while he folds laundry or preps dinner, basically just stopping by to say hello without interrupting the other work of the day. 

I do not love folding laundry — seriously, why is it this is the worst part of that chore? And yet, this type of hang sounds delightful. I am totally down for a laundry-folding grownup playdate, your place or mine. Just please ignore the herds of dust bunnies, that one patch of drywall that needs fixing, and the embarrassing number of ratty towels I own.

Leave us a comment and tag the person who you’d do a one-hour laundry or porch hang with anytime.

1. Here’s how I make my London Fog iced tea: Steep 6-7 Earl Grey tea bags (the London part) in 4 cups boiling water for about 5 minutes to make a strong brew. Strain out bags and stir in a bit of sugar or honey to taste (I like mine just barely sweetened) and a good splash of vanilla. Chill and store it in the fridge. When you’re ready to serve, pour over ice and add a little milk or cream (the fog). You could add the milk to the batch in the fridge, but I love the way it swirls through the dark tea in the glass.