A LONG WAY HOME

Ordinarily, I hate staying at someone's house, but when Hugh and I visited his friend Mary in Maine we had no other choice.

- DAVID SEDARIS

There weren't any hotels on the small island where she lives in the summer, and she'd seemed so genuine when she extended her invitation that we really couldn't refuse. Mary and Hugh went to college together a hundred thousand years ago, back when tuition was affordable and you could study things like acting without bankrupting yourself. Her auburn hair had turned mostly white since I'd last seen her, fifteen years earlier, and she wore it in an untidy bun.

There was another old classmate of Hugh and Mary's at the house that weekend. Luckily, his girlfriend was there as well, thus there were two of us who felt left out when the talk turned to former teachers and whatever happened to so-and-so.

Mary's secluded four-bedroom house was deep in the woods yet, still, on the waterfront. The bay she faced was quiet and as calm as a pond. It was August and we'd hit a patch of perfect weather. The days were warm without being hot, the sky blue and cloudless.

"I do have one rule," she said when we arrived. "No cell phones, iPads, or laptops on the ground floor."

You what? I thought. But it was her house, and so, for the first time in recent memory, I spent two and a half days talking to people and having them talk back. It was shocking to see no one staring down at their devices. That said, at our ages, we sort of needed them. "Did anyone see that movie... the funny one directed by the Greek who did that other movie about what's-her-name? Oh, you know, it starred... that actor. She was on that British TV show?"