Stay young, go dancing.

[Tibi dress + Club Monaco vest + Free People leather cuff + Citrine by the Stones tasseled bracelet.]

I was surveying a perfectly cooked filet mignon in a nearly empty dining room adorned with crystal chandeliers, white tablecloths, and a wildly talented pianist at one end playing standards for what I’ll guess was 4 seated tables scattered through the cavernous room.

Monday night in the dead of winter at a spectacular resort: do your best not to channel Jack Nicholson.

I made a friend within minutes, though: Victor, a ~30-yr vet of the resort who I’m sure I crossed patent-leather-shoed paths with numerous times as a kid.

‘My first dinner in this room was almost 30 years ago—a banana, swiped from of a Thanksgiving cornucopia display,’ I laughed, adding: ‘I sure missed it here,’ working to incorporate the correct amount of humility and reverence in my tone. Some people are effortless braggarts.

When your father brings you and your family along to the Alleghany mountains for work numerous times a year, but is then tied up in meetings most of the time, you get good at scouring every inch of a place and making it your Narnia. I’d break off and acquaint myself with drafty doors and echoey stairwells, spending entire days devouring books in one of the writing rooms, organizing chips on abandoned backgammon boards, penning post cards to friends in secret offices left unlocked, and stealing candy from conference tables in a private wing, off-limits to guests. The Greenbrier was a place where my imagination swallowed everything else whole.

It still does.

I knew I’d feel like things had changed. I knew I was acting like an old fart when I got grumpy about those changes, sore for times when you didn’t see kids sitting at computers in Internet cafes on the shop level. Jesus, there wasn’t even an Internet then.

I didn’t mind that no one recognized my last name anymore. Certain ships sail, but others haunt the foggy docks: I think about my brother and I, unhinged by the vastness of the place. We were almost reverential, sitting at a table by ourselves one night. [I pointed the exact one out to Rob as we walked by it.] Charlie and I had giggled—thrilled, but embarrassed—as a waiter cut my steak into bite-sized pieces for me. It was a different fragrance then than any I’ve gotten a whiff of these days, like something about being ‘our age’ back then was a younger sort of childhood than it is today. And I’ll stop myself there.

Life is sweet in the belly of the beast / In the belly of the beast
And with her song in your heart, it can never bring you down / It can never bring you down.

The old gentleman filled my glass, nodded, then smiled.

He began to walk away, when he turned back and said: “Welcome home.”

-Carey