(no subject)

My marvelous friend Barbara brought mutual-friend gossip this weekend along with herself and the snow. A friend got married to his girlfriend with only a few days notice, because she'd been laid off from her job and was going to lose health benefits.

Is this the 21st century equivalent of the shotgun wedding?

Can you imagine us years from today, sharing a park bench quietly?

The key marker for me for a lifelong friend is that we can go months or years in which life takes us out of each other's day-to-day awareness, and then when we get together, it's so comfortable that no time has passed at all.

bard_bloom's known Barbara since she was born, more or less. He's got a scar on his hand from when she bit him, when she was nine years old. He dated her sister in high school. When I went to graduate school in St. Louis, he recommended I meet her, and I did, and we dated a while. A few years later, Bard and I got involved with her as a couple, the only time we've really done something like that. We hadn't spoken for a few years, but she called when she heard through the grapevine that we'd had a baby, and she came to see us this weekend. She stayed all weekend, though we'd only planned to have dinner. She played with the mothlet. She made her own tea. It felt like we'd only been apart for weeks, not years.

I've managed to see Carol, one of my best friends from junior high and high school, only once in a blue moon since we graduated, though she lives less than two hours away. She led me around on a leash made of a sweater belt, then, once in a while. I visited her at college (she was a year ahead of me), and she saved me from indiscretions with fratboys at a keg party. She was a bridesmaid at my wedding. She came to see me after my father's funeral. We went to a folk festival together about 5 years ago, ran into each other at a concert of an acappella group (the Bobs) in which another friend from high school sings. She called when she got the birth announcement. There were no qualms about saying 'I love you' when I spoke to her again.

Tonight, she and I are going to a Simon and Garfunkel concert, the third time we've been to see Paul Simon together. The first time was for my birthday, in Shea Stadium, in what I think was the eight grade, though I'm too lazy to look up old tours and find out if my memory of the dates is right. We rode the NJ transit train with my dad. We wen't to see him again when he was doing his first solo tour, my junior year of high school I think 'cause by then one of us was driving; we got tckets in the front row and brought him two dozen roses and wrote a note about how much we loved him and how he was way way too good for Carrie Fisher.

We're not even in the best seats tonight, since even the second-to-best were $150. It's probably the last time we'll even get the chance to see our aging teenage heartthrob. But we're going, and I'm sure the last decade or so is going to just melt away.