Reunion Lunch

There needs to be more reunion lunches in my life. Today I had a visit from my old friend Penny Soder and it was great, but also made me miss our crowd of friends.   Penny and I have multiple connections. The first is she is married to one of my best friends from college, Doug Soder.

Doug is the reason we live in our house because when we decided to move here Doug, who was in Raleigh, told us about Hope Valley as a nice neighborhood and the rest is history. Penny ended up getting a job with my Dad and we worked together here and in London. Sadly the Soders left North Carolina for Long Meadow, Massachusetts with Penny vowing it would just be a few years that was 19 years ago.

Although we have seen each other on short visits and farm reunion weekends with college crowd, spouses and kids it has been too many years between visits as all our children got busier. We vowed today that once all our kids were in college we would have a real reunion.

I got to thinking about different groups of friends I have had over the years, boarding school, college, school in France, Washington friends, beach house friends, work friends, the list goes on. Facebook has changed the world to be able to keep up with what people are doing now, but it is not a good place to reminisce with groups of old friends. What I want is to have real face-to-face, live reunions with all my groups.

I know that people are busy and groups change thanks to moves, divorces and fights, but really all those things could be over come. If I won the lottery I think it would be fun to buy a big resort and just have a different reunion every weekend.

My family has had a fairly good track of reunions mostly put on by my parent’s generation. My cousins and I are now feeling it is time for us to step up and put on the next reunion but finding a time is proving the most difficult part of the whole thing.

The actual reunion is easy, bring people together who liked each other at one point, but have just not seen each other, give them a little food and a good place to sit and talk and the rest will take care of itself. I’m calling out to all my groups, lets have some reunions.