In the arms and lap of Suzanne, one of my oldest friends
Stay around long enough, and you’ll meet yourself and everyone else you love coming and going, sometimes even more so, like all of 2015 for me. People and places seemingly long gone and far away rolled through my life, or I rolled through them all year long, from friends I haven’t seen in over a decade to landscapes imprinted in my imagination a very long time ago. Oh, reunions, how I love thee, especially when guided by serendipity, surprise and the awesome magic of picking up just when we left over 4 or 40 years ago.
Some of the reunions were well- engineered, such as a long-planned trip to Big Bend National Park in extreme (and I mean “extreme” in every way you can imagine) West Texas, where Ken and I honeymooned 30 years earlier. It was the first time I experienced desert, and let’s just say I wasn’t a happy camping (I do mean camping, which was on the side of a mountain surrounded by javelinas). This time, we stayed in a lodge in the Davis Mountains, a place we discovered in ’85 when we only had an afternoon in this savannah, a lush and dry at once landscape mixing prairie and forest with big expanses of mountain behind mountain. “Let’s go back here and spend more time,” my 25-year-old self told my 30-year-old husband. Turns out, we just needed three decades to make that happen, and upon returning, it was all brand new an
Other places I threw my happy arms around included a usual reunion hangout — my often-annual trip to New York and Brooklyn, this time walking across the Brooklyn Bridge my parents crossed regularly with my siblings and me back in the 60s (in the back of a wood-paneled station wagon) when we lived in Brooklyn, and our dad worked in lower Manhattan. Of course, I also visited the old subway arcade, closed since 9/11, where my dad’s store was long ago.
Catherine and Ken near Madison
Some re-meetings were more far-flung, like going back to Madison, WI a mere 27 years after we trekked up there in a baby blue VW van with friends for the wedding of Catherine and Peter. Amazingly enough, Daniel (our oldest son), upon settling in Madison for graduate school, at a barn dance ferreted out Catherine, who he had never met, because something about her seemed familiar. Reunion ensued with great joy, amazing food, and a vengeance!
The big tree near Columbia with old friend John
I found a town I lost by mistake — Columbia, Missouri, where I lived for some extremely formative college years when I was teetering between daily infactuations with all the least-likely candidates, too many part-time jobs (from making popcorn to shaking newspapers together), occasional schoolwork, and a whole lot of roaming all hours of the night through the town I claimed as mine. Nothing like brunch with cialis best price three old friends to open my heart and remind me why it’s never a good idea to remind them about the time I said, “Anarchists, Socialists! What’s the difference?” It also wasn’t a good idea to lose a town less than three hours away, and in January, we have another mini reunion there with pals John and Suzanne.
Stephanie with the late and great CJ
Other reunions came swiftly by surprise, like when our old friend David called to say that, surprise!, he was coming to town in two days. We were able, although we were about to leave town ourselves early the next morning, squeeze in a beautiful visit complete with lingering dinner and catching up on everything from the nuances of our children to climate change. Our pal Stephanie was able to stop in on her way across the country for deep conversation and a lovely walk both in the country and downtown. In all cases, we talked, as the old cliche tells us, like no time had passed although we were sharing many vivid moments about what exactly happened (as much as we can conjure it) in some of that passing time.
With old friends at the poetry therapy conference in Black Mountain, N.C.
Getting on the road sparked all kinds of reunions. I loved seeing old friends from Lawrence in Minneapolis, and also reuniting several times with siblings of my friend, Jerry, who died over a year ago, but left us one another. Various conferences threw me in the arms of it’s-been-too-long-since-we-talked friends in Black Mountain, NC, Minneapolis, and Kansas City. I got to hang out with my sisters and mom, niece and nephew, and new brother-in-law in Orlando, and a bevy of Ken’s family we hadn’t seen in a while.
My cousin (front, left) I reunited with after 43 years (I’m behind my brother, and my cousin in front of his).
Back home around Thanksgiving, I reconnected with one of my cousins who I grew up with but lost to family distance (both the geographic and emotional kinds) for 43 years. While we’ve talked some on the phone and have emailed in recent years, there’s nothing like getting back together in person after over four decades. It was hard to stop talking, and I look forward to meet talking to make up for lost time.
Andrew and family with Daniel and me on the back deck
And just last week, my old pal and office mate Andrew visited from Macau (near Hong Kong) with his wife and 17-year-old daughter who was a toddler last time we saw her.
Everything circles, spirals, vanishes in the swamp of life, and then pops back up. This year, that included even the Kansas City Royals, who won the World Series for the first time in 30 years, reuniting us all with the Royals’ slogan, “keep the line moving,” which means just to get a hit, any hit, keep moving, and if everyone works hard, plays smart, and gets the right pitch, you’ll get to run back home. The line, it turns out, never was a line to begin with, and if wait at home long enough or wander far enough away, you’ll likely find out just how curvy and hilly time is. I couldn’t be more grateful for each homecoming.
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