Ten years later

In an hour or so, I'll head downtown for a traditional Christmas celebration.  Yes, it's time for another gathering of the Old Office Gang.

I find it hard to believe, but it was ten years ago this past summer that I retired from my job as a defense attorney for a locally-headquartered insurance company -- a legal department position I'd held for about sixteen years.  Although I didn't realize it at the time, our company was on the verge of acquisition by a large Massachusetts insurer.  As a result of this acquisition, many of my co-workers found themselves, voluntarily or not so voluntarily, seeking other employment.

I felt fortunate to be old enough to be justified in retiring, and to be hanging onto a 401k account that made the idea not preposterous.

In any event, within a matter of months, maybe half (maybe more) of our legal department had moved on to other endeavors -- most of them with other insurers or with private legal firms.  It was an exciting and unsettling time, and it seemed appropriate to get together in the midst of all the chaos to exchange gossip and our plans for the future.

Actually, many of us had been meeting after work occasionally, for a number of years.  We got together at Oliver's, a small, quiet hotel bar in a hotel adjacent to the building in which most of us had first met.  And to Oliver's we instinctively returned.

We met monthly at first.  We felt that eventually our meetings would stop, once we had all found ourselves new places to work (or, in my case, not work).  And after several years, we did gradually meet less frequently.  But, surprisingly, we never stopped completely.  Ten years later, we still meet at irregular intervals, several times a year and always at Christmas.

And we will meet today.  We hang out for maybe three hours, consume a couple or three drinks each, discuss our work and our travels, and generally -- in a world where people tend to drift apart -- keep in touch.  Most of us are attorneys, but paralegals and legal secretaries are also invited and some regularly attend.  We have a core group of about six who always show up unless they have a conflict, but we have a total of sixteen names at present on the "notification" list.  The list expands or contracts depending on peoples' interest.  And we often extend oral invitations to those not on the list but who we feel might be interested.  "Significant others" are always invited, and often enjoy attending.

I'm pleased that we've kept the tradition alive.  I realize from talking with others that it's a tradition that isn't all that common among former co-employees.  But we had a certain esprit de corps while working together, and it's been a strong enough bond to continue for the first decade after we otherwise went our separate ways.