A week ago last Friday night, I stopped into a 24-hour supermarket on my way home from a St. Patty’s party. I’d been careful not to overindulge, but my mouth felt dry and gummy anyway, and I knew from experience that I would probably need a dose of electrolytes and rehydration therapy come morning.

The supermarket is a strange place late at night. The Muzak plays a little too loudly without the usual buzz of human activity to muffle it, and you can also hear softer sounds that go unnoticed in the daylight hours: the crackle of the fluorescent lights overhead, the whirr of the refrigerated drink cases, the clatter made by an unseen stocker throwing cans onto a distant shelf. You get a sense of just how monstrously big these stores are when the only other person in sight is a bored checker who has nothing better to do than file her nails and flip through this week’s Enquirer. The overwhelming sense is similar to what I’ve experienced upon arriving in Europe after a long flight, an eerie feeling of disconnection, as if you’re just gliding through the world unnoticed like a ghost, or maybe a character out of a 1950s French novel.

Of course, I could’ve just been feeling the Jameson I’d consumed earlier more than I thought I was.

In any event, I’d just paid for three bottles of Gatorade and was turning to leave when I saw a woman about my age walking in with three young girls in tow. She and I briefly made eye contact and, to my surprise, there came that odd electric sensation of recognizing somebody you haven’t seen in a very long time. Then she smiled widely, and I knew she had just felt the same mild shock. We veered toward each other and met up in front of the public bulletin board with all its notices about missing dogs and school fundraisers.

(Before I go any farther, let me assure my three loyal readers that this isn’t one of those Dan Fogelberg “met my old lover in the grocery store” things. This woman and I were never lovers; we only went out once or twice our senior year of high school. But I shared classes with her all four of my years at Bingham High, and I always liked her a great deal.)

“Hey,” she said, “How are you?”

“I’m good,” I replied. “How are you? Wow, it’s been, like, forever…”

I knew her name, of course, but I hesitated to say it out loud, for fear that maybe, just maybe, 20 years of distance had scrambled a few of my neural connections and I would end up embarrassing myself in spite of my certainty. I’ve gotten burned that way a couple of times in recent years. And anyway, I couldn’t tell for sure if she remembered my name, and I didn’t want to cause her any embarrassment .

“So what’re you shopping for in the middle of the night?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m picking up some Gatorade.” She lifted her eyebrows slightly, as if that was a weird thing to be buying at ten minutes after midnight. “I’m on my way home from a party,” I added.

She shot a quick glance at the three young girls, who I now realized were surely her daughters. I wondered if I’d said too much, if she was trying to figure out how to explain to her early-teenage daughters why a man their mother had known two decades ago would need to buy Gatorade following a party.

“So, what’re you doing here?” I asked, hoping to defuse what may have been — or maybe was not — an uncomfortable situation for her.

“We’re getting some ice cream. The girls just had a big dance recital — ” That explains the spandex and rhinestone outfits, I thought, ” — and I promised them a little therapy session with Dr. Ben and Dr. Jerry.”

My former classmate sent her girls off to pick out their ice cream while the two of us chatted. I asked if she worked or if she was a stay-at-home mom. She asked what I did for a living. We both nodded approvingly at the other’s answers and told each other how cool it was that we still lived in the old neighborhood where we’d grown up.

We complemented each other on still looking good — I think she maybe she was being polite, but I meant every word — and then her girls were back and she had to go pay for their “therapy.”

As she walked away from me, she spoke sincerely over her shoulder: “Take care of yourself, Jason.”

So she remembered my name after all. I felt a warm spark of pleasure. I think I may have actually preened. I told her to do the same, and I called her by name; she preened back, and I knew I’d gotten it right after all.

As I walked out across the dark parking lot, I experienced a fleeting sense of what it had felt like to be 17, earnest and hopeful with a bounce in my step, back when the south end of the valley was more hay fields than asphalt, and a kid with a fiver in his pocket and a sunny day ahead considered himself a rich man. I remembered how terrifying it had been to lift the phone and dial the number of the girl I’d just spoken to, and how uplifting it had been when she’d said yes, she’d go out with me, in a voice 20 years younger than the one I’d heard tonight. I remembered the name of the movie we saw together — Some Kind of Wonderful — and I thought I could even summon up a phantom of the perfume she used to wear.

Back at my car, The Girlfriend was curled up in the passenger seat and looking like she’d been struggling not to doze off. She asked what had taken so long. “I ran into someone I knew from Bingham,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “Of course you did. You’re always running into somebody. I can’t take you anywhere…”

It’s an old, familiar gag between us, and it always makes me chuckle. Partly because Anne acts so put out as she says it (she isn’t really, but she always makes it seem like she is), but mostly because it’s true. The CD player came on in mid-track as I turned the ignition: Eric Clapton’s “Hello, Old Friend.” I couldn’t have planned it any better.

As it turned out, I didn’t need the Gatorade after all when the morning came. But in thinking about the previous evening, I realized I can no longer remember what classes I shared with my old friend, and I’m not even sure anymore if we had a second date or if it was just that one movie. Seventeen is definitely gone, and some mornings — even the ones when I’ve dodged a hangover — I feel all of my 37 years pressing down upon me.