Actually this story ends better than that song, so I”ll stop right there. (Song was “My Life” by Billy Joel. Good tune!)
Anyway–in the spring of ’82, our school got two bomb threats that resulted in all the students stuck outside in the football stadiums for two and three hours at a time. I would have been bored shitless, but I started to converse with Diana–and she was the only person in my entire grade who had read The Lord of the Rings and Dragon Riders of Pern and we didn’t stop talking for the entire fire drill. Pretty soon we were sharing lockers and taking the same classes and we’ve been friends ever since.
Now, reading material aside, we seem to be pretty much the opposite in anyway–right down to she’s short and blond and I’m tall and redheaded, she’s from a fairly brainy, conservative family, while my family is a little more blue collar. I mean, her parents had our loathsome German teacher to their house for dinner! It’s like they were aliens!
Except they weren’t.
They were totally nice people, and getting to spend the day with my friend today felt like we’d never stopped talking.
I mean, for six hours, seriously, we never stopped talking.
I dropped her off and felt bad–I wanted to get back together and maybe talk some more!
And it’s funny–because we met 37 years ago. Like, an ENTIRE ADULT ago, and we both had adult children of our own now, and we’d both had loss and uncertainty and sadness and pain and joy. We’ve kept up sporadically, but our last visit was ten years ago. It wasn’t like that time and growth HADN’T happened–it was just like now we had a chance to talk about it–like we’d been WAITING to talk about it.
Like seeing the other person grow from who they were as an awkward high school and college student to a grown-assed adult was just exactly the way we were meant to see each other.
And we were still chatty as school girls.
Anyway– she walked the dogs with me, took ZoomBoy to the dentist, had lunch at my favorite cafe, and then came with me to the yarn store for a shawl pin. It was a busy happy day with a friend I’ve never grown apart from–I just hadn’t seen in quite a while.
We need to make it not another ten years. One of the things that we’ve learned in the last thirty-seven is that life is really fuckin’ short. Too short to not see good friends for that long a stretch a time.
