09.16.08
Old Friends
Kelly and I have been celebrating our birthdays with one another for over twenty-seven years, which is half of my lifetime and more than half of hers. We first met while working for the same management company and while there, began the tradition of treating the other to lunch for her birthday. Recently, we met at a deli for my birthday celebration. Two of Kelly’s co-workers whom I had never met accompanied her. She suggested they ask me anything they wanted to know about her. I replied, “You may not want to count on my memory. This morning I was cooking oatmeal in the microwave. When the ding…ding…went off, I opened the door to find the microwave empty and my bowl of oatmeal on the counter.”
Perhaps it was the fact that Kelly had two friends along that we spent most of our lunch reminiscing about mischievous pranks at work, and in rapid fire succession told humorous stories of papering houses (yes, after the age of thirty), the time the wind blew my dress up to reveal… We reminisced about me as a bridesmaid in her wedding and then grieved the bodies we once had.
It seems just yesterday that I had wallpapered the nursery before the birth of her oldest child, who is now in college. Then later, she loaned me her maternity clothes. My “baby” is a high school senior. Our children have long outgrown the annual Easter parties. Kelly and I rarely see each other between the two annual birthday celebrations - separated by careers and family obligations, yet I know she would be here in a minute if I needed her.
After our recent lunch I was thinking about our long-standing friendship and thought of a song I learned as a young Girl Scout. “Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold.” Such wisdom is learned only through experience. Simon and Garfunkel were a popular duo in the late -1960’s when I was in junior high school. Perhaps it won’t be long before I will have experienced the meaning of their popular recording “Old Friends.”
Old Friends
Written by Paul Simon
Old friends,
Old friends
Sat on their park bench
Like bookends.
A newspaper blown though the grass
Falls on the round toes
Of the high shoes
Of the old friends.
Old friends,
Winter companions,
The old men
Lost in their overcoats,
Waiting for the sunset.
The sounds of the city,
Sifting through trees,
Settle like dust
On the shoulders
Of the old friends.
Can you imagine us
Years from today,
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange
To be seventy.
Old friends,
Memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fears
