Old Age Day by Day June 14, 2011

A friend is coming in a week to visit. She hasn't been here in over 40 years! The last time she was out she was driving across country with her girlfriend after graduating from college, and she stopped on the way in Texas and secretly wed her college sweetheart, who was killed 3 months later in Vietnam. I missed her second wedding, because I'd just returned from Fiji with a 7 month old baby, and she settled into farm life in Indiana and I was out here. She had 3 kids, I had 4. I've seen her a couple of times when I went to Indiana, first visiting my husband's family, then with a mutual friend when her husband left her when she was 50 and then for her son's wedding a few years ago. She moved to New York, after she retired from teaching, to be near her older daughter, but it was after my two had moved away from Brooklyn, so I had no reason to be there. I found out she had done a few trips to Las Vegas with her two daughters, and had not attempted to come here, so I've been waiting for her to make an effort my direction. I know we'll be giggling and catching up, but we have an awful lot of catching up to do. We were very different as children and young adults, so it will be interesting to see how well we get along. I met her when I moved to Virginia at 8, and I left at 14. We were best friends in a small, small town, and she and her parents visited us once here when I was a senior in high school. She watched me win the audition for Angelina in Gilbert and Sullivan's "Trial by Jury". She worked at the House of Representatives and adored Richard Nixon, I was marching in protest against him. She married her first husband's best buddy in Vietnam, I married a South Asian from the Fiji Islands. But we talked on the phone, and have kept in touch through Christmas cards. I couldn't come to her older daughter's wedding because my older daughter was getting married in the same place (New York) two weeks later. I made it for her son's wedding, but her younger daughter's was on New Year's Eve in Indiana, not the time or place I could make it. Now she has five grandchildren, and I have one. Her father died only several years ago and her mother is still alive, in that tiny town, with her son nearby to see after her. I was glad I saw them both at their grandson's wedding, and it was poignant, because my parents had been dead many years by then. I want to see if she still takes an hour to "get ready" in the morning. I'd be done in ten minutes, unable to figure out what exactly it was she did. But she always looks good. I'm a grub, in comparison. As you can tell, I'm getting excited.