The idea of the social dinner is somewhat foreign to me. One couple invites another couple over and prepares food for them, they engage in amiable conversation and part with a promise of reciprocal arrangements in the near future. It sounds like something Rob & Laura Petri would do -- the stuff of unattainable adulthood. These kind of arrangements make me very nervous: partially because they demand a measure of forced talkativeness, in which I perform abysmally, and partially because I don't eat with my enemies, and you never know which way a new person might go.

But people really do this. In the past, I've only formed friendships with people with whom I shared a certain stable social situation. Most of my deepest relationships have been the direct result of happenstance: the slow, natural result of working or living near or with others. It appears that in the real world, you have to work harder at it. Most people reach out to each other to form friendships, put energy into finding the time to see each other regularly. They do things like invite near-strangers over and cook dinner for them as a way of saying "I might like to be your friend."

Last night, for example, Susan and I were invited over to the house of a couple who work at a nonprofit organization where she serves on the Board. We'd talked to them with some regularity and seen them at various events, but the dinner invitation flummoxed me. I have this nervous feeling going over to the house of someone I barely know, like they are going to try to sell me Amway or give me a lot of Baha'i literature.

Part of my trepidation stems from my belief that most people are more comfortable with casual friendship than I am. My approach to human relationships tends to be binary -- individuals are either close friends or mere acquaintances. It's a matter of trust, and I'm unwilling to create a gradation of friendship that calls for me to invest partial trust in untested and unfamiliar personalities. It typically takes about a year for any given individual to transit from acquaintance to friend. Shared hardship tends to accelerate the process -- for example, among my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers, or the ambulance crew with whom I ran grisly calls in Ohio -- but there isn't such a thing as a "fast friend" in my book. Interestingly, I have to get a temporary crush on just about everyone whom I eventually call a friend. This can be as short as a couple of days or as long as a few weeks, but it's virtually unavoidable.

We'd been juggling dates for this dinner for a while, mostly because of the caustic harmful-to-social-life properties of my rescue squad schedule. So when the evening came, I felt a little unprepared. I was in the shower a few minutes before we were scheduled to leave when a terrible thought occurred to me. "Do they know we're vegetarians?" I asked Susan.

"Hoo shit," she said. Somehow, in the confusion of setting a day, we had failed to communicate the fact that we don't eat meat. I envisioned Shawn and his wife cooking up some delicious steaks on our behalf. Already running late, we discussed our options in a paralytic moment of social panic. I didn't think that a few bites of flesh would taint my soul appreciably after twelve years of meatlessness, bit previous experience had shown that eating meat after being veggie for a long time could cause significant upset of the digestive organs. Given my daily training schedule for fire fighting class, I don't have the time or energy to spend a day or so violently jetting indigestible matter from either end of my alimentary canal.

"They are going to think we're the biggest fucking losers," I said, but we decided to forego eating meat as a silent gesture of companionship and just tell them the truth straight out. I suggested that we might want to bring some emergency backup food in case the meal was unwaveringly carnivorous, but Susan felt this would be even weirder. There had to be some sort of side dish we could pig out on.

Fifteen minutes late, and feeling like utter morons, we set out for their home an hour away. We were following a set of directions that Susan had printed out, and by moving at an unusually fast pace began to make up some time. We were just beginning to feel like the evening might not be a complete washout, when we realized that we'd forgotten one crucial piece of information: their address.

"Clearly we are not meant to be their friends," Susan said. I had to agree that universal signs were pointing to this as an inauspicious beginning. We ended up pulling into their little cul-de-sac and asking a passing driver if he knew where our onetime potential friends lived. He had no clue, and we had just decided to park and start canvassing the neighborhood when the couple saw us driving by and came out to the road to wave us in.

Things were bubbling on the stove. They did not smell overtly meaty, so Susan and I both hesitated to blurt out the awful truth. Shawn flipped pasta into a strainer -- a good sign. We chatted and continued to neglect the topic of dietary preference. When a pot was opened to stir the contents, I glimpsed tomato sauce, and edged over to casually peer inside and determine the meat content. It appeared low, and possibly avoidable. Huzzah -- we might get away with merely straining out the meat and dining as if we were normal guests.

By now, of course, it was too late for confession: the time in which it might have been appropriate to inform our kind hosts that we considered refusing to eat their thoughtfully prepared dinner had passed, so we sat down to eat. Carefully, covertly, we avoided and ate around the meaty bits. Years of training -- in times and places where my vegetarianism instantly became a topic of contention with the people around me -- has made me an expert at this. I distributed the undesired foodstuffs in patterns, hidden beneath cover provided by other unconsumed bits, in a configuration that greatly reduced their visual impact and made it almost impossible to detect my underlying purpose. Susan was less stealthy, but she has converted in a time and place where she is less likely to find herself in vitriolic arguments over what she chooses to eat.

Despite the looming impact of my various hang-ups, the evening was perfectly enjoyable. When we got home, Susan and I plopped down in front of the tube to watch a PBS documentary called Test of Courage: The Making of a Firefighter. Of course. Can a day go by without talking about fire fighting? I was eager to see the show, and I thought it might provide Susan with a better sense of what my training was really like. Of course, the whole thing had to end with a firefighter dying, and footage of the funeral -- precisely the kind of images I'm trying to quell here at the homestead. Plans to send the tape to my mom were immediately scrapped.