The Second Summer: One Year Later, the Four Are Back

A Washington reunion, a year of stories, and what friendship teaches us about returning

There are evenings that become important without anyone realizing it at the time. No ceremony announces them. No one stops in the middle of happy hour and declares that this particular night will matter a year from now. You simply meet, sit down, begin talking, and decide somewhere along the way that the evening should continue. One place becomes another. The weather is too pleasant to go home. Conversation stretches from a restaurant table onto the sidewalk and through the city, and somewhere between the first drink and the final goodnight, people who began with separate lives start creating a shared history.

That is what happened last September in Washington, DC, when Beverly, Evan, Ava and I first spent an evening together. A year later, we reunited, and there was something beautifully circular about beginning almost exactly where we had begun before: happy hour, conversation, and the easy decision to see where the evening would take us. This time, we gathered at Zaytinya, settled around the table, and began the impossible task of fitting twelve months of separate living into a few hours.

Catching up among friends is rarely chronological. One person begins a story, someone else remembers something connected to it, another person interrupts because a detail suddenly feels essential, and before long four separate years begin overlapping around one table. That was exactly how our reunion unfolded. I had arrived in Washington after weeks traveling across the United States by train, carrying stories from Hollywood, the Bay Area, Utah, Michigan, Chicago, and all the miles and people in between. Naturally, Hollywood entered the conversation first. I talked about dinners, gatherings, meetings, personalities, unexpected invitations, and those wonderfully strange experiences that seem almost ordinary while you are living them but become much more colorful once you begin retelling them to friends.

But I was not giving a report about my summer. Beverly, Evan and Ava had lived their own year, and their stories were constantly weaving themselves into mine. Something from Hollywood would trigger a memory from Ava. Something Beverly mentioned would send Evan in another direction. Work, travel, family, mutual friends, people we had met, places we had been, and things that had changed since the previous September all moved through the conversation together. We were not taking turns presenting our lives. We were intermixing them again, which may be one of the most honest definitions of reunion. You do not simply tell people where you have been. You discover where everyone else has been while you were away.

Somewhere in the middle of all that conversation, I looked up.

There was Mayor Muriel Bowser.

It was one of those small sprinklings of Washington life that hardly needs explanation. You can be sitting at a private reunion with friends, talking about trains and Hollywood, and suddenly the Mayor of Washington, DC, happens to be in the same room. Our eyes met, she gave a nod, and everyone continued with the evening.

The moment carried another layer for me because Mayor Bowser was already part of a previous Washington chapter. During WorldPride DC the year before, HRH Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil and I had crossed paths with the Mayor several times. Her office and staff had also set aside time for a meeting with us, alongside Sister Jenna and leadership from the Brahma Kumaris, during a Washington visit that included our A Royal Commitment book tour and an event at DC’s LGBTQ community center. That Washington had been filled with WorldPride, advocacy, public events, conversations about equality, our memoir, and the work Manvendra and I have carried together for years.

Now, one year later, I was back in Washington under completely different circumstances. Manvendra was not beside me. I had crossed the country by train. I was sitting with friends sharing stories from Hollywood and places far beyond the Beltway. Then I looked up and saw a familiar face from another Washington chapter.

A nod was enough.

Not every encounter needs a photograph. Not every moment of recognition needs to become an announcement. Sometimes it is enough to acknowledge one another and allow everyone to continue living the evening they came to live. That, too, is Washington. Public life and private life can occupy the same room, and then the city simply keeps moving.

Eventually, so did we.

Outside, Washington had given us one of those September evenings when summer seems unwilling to admit that its season is beginning to end. Ava called it “the second summer,” and the phrase stayed with me immediately. The heavy heat had softened, yet autumn had not fully arrived. The air was warm without being oppressive, the sidewalks invited walking, and the city seemed to be offering us a little more time outdoors than the calendar might have promised.

The second summer.

A little more warmth. Another evening outside. Another opportunity to stay in something good a little longer.

So we walked.

Our next stop was Little Gay Pub, and this was where the past and present began to overlap more deliberately. Zaytinya and Little Gay Pub were the two places that connected directly to our first evening together the year before. We had done this part before. Happy hour, conversation, then Little Gay Pub. Returning gave the beginning of our reunion a quiet familiarity without turning the evening into an exercise in nostalgia.

The difference was us.

Last year, we were discovering one another. This year, there were shared references. Names no longer needed introductions. Stories had previous chapters. Someone could begin with “Remember when…” and the rest of us already understood the road we were about to travel.

That is one of the subtle ways you realize an acquaintance has become a friendship. The first time, you explain. Later, you remember together.

As we moved through Washington, another reality remained visible around us. National Guard personnel were still on patrol, an unmistakable presence in the city, yet ordinary Washington continued around them. Restaurants were busy. People walked their dogs. Friends gathered outside bars. Couples moved along the sidewalks. Cars circled the avenues. People laughed, ate dinner, headed home, and carried on with their lives.

That contrast is part of Washington too.

The city is often presented to the rest of the world through institutions: the White House, Congress, courts, agencies, embassies, monuments, security, and the constant machinery of government. But Washington is also a living city. People build routines here. They have favorite restaurants and neighborhood bars. They fall in love, argue, celebrate birthdays, meet friends after work, and walk home beneath trees that have witnessed generations of political history without ever becoming political themselves.

On this particular September night, four friends were simply moving through that city together.

After Little Gay Pub, we stopped retracing the previous year and began making a new memory.

We went to Number Nine.

Number Nine had not been part of our first evening together. It belonged entirely to this one, and almost immediately it gave us something none of us could have planned.

Evan ran into a dear friend he had known for more than thirty years.

They had not seen each other in at least fourteen.

There are moments between people that are difficult to explain because what happens emotionally is so much larger than what appears physically. Two people recognize one another. Their faces change. The distance between them disappears. A name is spoken with the weight of history behind it. Years that seemed enormous only moments earlier suddenly feel strangely small.

What made the encounter even more remarkable was that Number Nine had once been one of the places connected to their friendship. They had history there. That space had been part of their lives before, and now, after at least fourteen years without seeing one another, life had somehow brought them back around to the same place.

I found myself watching more than participating.

There was something extraordinary about witnessing friendship come alive in real time. Not friendship as a concept. Not friendship preserved in an old photograph or displayed through social media. Lived friendship. Two people standing before one another carrying more than thirty years of knowing, years lived together, years lived apart, and a familiarity that had somehow survived all of it.

Fourteen years is a long time. People move. Jobs change. Families change. Relationships begin and end. Bodies change. Cities change. Entire chapters can open and close. Yet there are some relationships that seem to keep their own memory.

Watching Evan and his friend reminded me that connection is not always measured by frequency.

We often judge relationships by how often people call, how quickly they answer a message, how regularly they meet, or how continuously they remain in one another’s daily lives. Those things matter, but they are not the only measure of what has been real. Some friendships carry history more strongly than routine. Distance does not automatically erase what two people shared. Time does not make every bond disappear.

Sometimes two people walk into the same room after fourteen years and something recognizes the way home.

The timing of that moment stayed with me because Beverly, Evan, Ava and I were together celebrating, in our own quiet way, one year since the beginning of our friendship, while right in front of us stood a friendship spanning more than thirty years.

One year and thirty years were occupying the same evening.

There was something beautiful in that.

The moment did not belong to me, but I was grateful to witness it. Some experiences teach you simply by allowing you to stand nearby.

Eventually, our own evening continued.

We moved on through Washington under Ava’s second-summer sky and gradually made our way toward The Wharf. There was no grand itinerary directing us there. The Wharf is close to where Ava and Evan live, Beverly was hungry, and by that point in the evening it made sense to head in that direction.

Sometimes the best transitions in life are that simple.

Someone is hungry. Home is getting closer for someone else. You find somewhere comfortable to sit. Another memory begins.

We stopped at Kirwan’s on the Wharf.

The others shared a meal while I ordered an apple cider drink. I was not particularly hungry by then, although I did have a little of the shrimp roll. The evening had reached that comfortable point where food was no longer the center of what was happening. We were simply sitting together, letting the conversation continue while the night slowly wound itself down.

Then another memory surfaced.

Kirwan’s was familiar to me, but not because the four of us had ended our first gathering there. Beverly and I had eaten lunch at Kirwan’s the previous year with Edward, a friend Manvendra and I had made at an HRC event during WorldPride.

That had been another day, another group of people, another Washington chapter.

Now Beverly and I were sitting in the same restaurant again, this time with Evan and Ava, ending an entirely different evening.

I love when life does that.

A restaurant has no idea how many versions of you have sat at its tables. A street does not know what you were thinking the first time you walked down it. A neighborhood does not know which friendship began there, which conversation changed something, which person disappeared from your life, or which person unexpectedly returned.

Places simply remain.

We are the ones who give them memory.

Sitting at Kirwan’s, I could feel how many different Washingtons had accumulated in my life over a relatively short period of time. There was the Washington of WorldPride. The Washington of Manvendra and our book tour. The Washington of Sister Jenna and the Brahma Kumaris. The Washington of advocacy and meetings. The Washington where Edward became a friend. The Washington where Beverly and I once sat at Kirwan’s for lunch. The Washington where Beverly, Evan, Ava and I first discovered that we enjoyed being together.

And now there was this Washington.

One year later.

Four friends sitting together again.

Ava and Evan nearly home.

Beverly finally getting something to eat.

An apple cider drink in front of me.

A little shrimp roll.

More conversation.

More life added to a place that already carried memory.

By then I found myself returning to Ava’s phrase.

The second summer.

At first, she had simply been describing the weather. Somewhere between Zaytinya and Kirwan’s, the words had come to describe the entire evening.

A second summer is an extension. It is warmth continuing after you have begun preparing yourself for another season. It is another walk outside, another evening at a table, a little more time than you thought you had.

Friendship can feel that way too.

Not because time stops. It does not. Not because people remain unchanged. We do not. The value is precisely that we return changed. We bring back everything that happened while we were apart, and if the friendship is strong enough, there is room at the table for those new versions of ourselves.

I had returned carrying America by rail.

Hollywood. California. Utah. Michigan. Chicago. Train stations. Landscapes passing beyond windows. People who entered my journey for an afternoon, a few days, or only the length of a conversation.

Beverly, Evan and Ava arrived carrying their own twelve months.

For one September evening, those separate stories met again.

We began with happy hour at Zaytinya, just as friendship often begins, around a table with conversation. A familiar Mayor appeared and gave a quiet nod. We stepped outside into Ava’s second summer and returned to Little Gay Pub, one of the places tied to the beginning of the four of us.

Then we moved forward.

Number Nine was new.

There, we watched a friendship of more than thirty years come unexpectedly alive after at least fourteen years apart.

Then we walked toward The Wharf, partly because Ava and Evan were getting closer to home and partly because Beverly was hungry.

We ended at Kirwan’s, a place that already held another Washington memory for me, and quietly added one more.

That may be what stayed with me most.

The night was full of returns, but none of them asked us to live in the past.

We returned to people.

We returned to places.

We returned to memories.

Then we kept moving.

That is what friendship must eventually do if it is going to remain alive. It can honor where it began without demanding that every new chapter imitate the first.

Last September, four people met for happy hour and discovered that they enjoyed walking through Washington together.

This September, we came back carrying a year of life with us.

And somewhere along the way, while watching an old friendship awaken at Number Nine and later sitting at Kirwan’s with another layer of Washington history around me, I understood something I had not fully considered when the evening began.

Friendship rarely announces itself when it starts.

You often recognize its importance only when you return.

A year passes.

You look around the table.

Everyone came back.

Different year.

Different stories.

More life behind us.

The same four.

The four are back.

And Ava was right.

Washington had given us a second summer.

Maybe friendship had too.