One is Silver and the Other is Gold

This has been THE week for connecting with old friends. Last Friday, I had a tasty dim sum lunch with a friend of mine whom I met freshman year of high school on our church softball team. It has been at least twelve years since we saw each other last, and probably six or more since we even spoke on the phone. I also had the good fortune of meeting his wife of many years, and his friend who lives around here and is in the same field as I, which led to a few boring minutes for everyone else in the lunch party, as you may imagine. They were leaving the next day for their Alaskan cruise, so, yeah, lucky ducks.

After the lunch I had the pleasure of talking on the phone with someone I went to Catholic grade school with in Orlando, Florida, something like a hundred and fifty years ago. Ostensibly the conversation was a plea for mentorship, and I got some, so that was good. But the most fun was lining up estimations of the mean nuns vs. the nice nuns. I have little doubt that all of these nuns have shuffled off this mortal coil, so it's probably not cool to name names on the mean ones, but Sister Eugenia, if you can read this, you were the sweetest. Thanks for choosing me to be the mom in the mock baptism.

This week, in addition to having a pretty interesting phone chat with a high school chum I re-met at the reunion, a friend from graduate school contacted me to let me know she was going to be in our own little suburb. Amazing! Grad school represents kind of a lost year for me- I didn't excel in my classes, and I spent most of my time trying to figure out how to work the forty hours of crappy retail that enabled me to eat and pay my rent and still at least skim some of the forty hours of assigned reading for my classes every week. It's a bit of a blur. But I did get a couple of good friends out of it. Though this week's visitor had been out of my loop for a long time, she and her impressively cute 8-month-old daughter and their local host agreed to come over to our house for some dinner. She is just as I remember her, energizing and definite and beautiful, but now with the added bonus of a tot that is almost cute and sweet enough to make you consider having more of your own. Almost, I said.

Oh yeah. It's been a good week. Just to keep up my streak, on Monday my college BFF and I will be meeting up with some of my dearest companions from the 80s, the members of Depeche Mode. Cue the synthesizers.