My 24 Hour Step Back Twenty Five Years

I just ran up to Washington DC for the night so I could go to my friend John McLarty’s fiftieth birthday party that our friend David Macaulay threw for him.  It was a quick 24-hour trip that I made alone that was really like stepping back into my old life before I was a wife or mother and lived my carefree life in DC.

Well, I don’t think I really had a carefree life in DC.  I basically worked all the time either selling mailing opening and extracting machines or catering.  But I did have a great group of friends who also worked too hard, but we played plenty together.

Last night I had a wonderful dinner with my friend Dorothy Dordelman Pearson catching up on lives, loves, children, crazy people we might be related to, the need to clean out our attics and promises to help each other and all the things that old friends talk about.  To give you an idea of the kind of friend Dot is her youngest child was born four days before Russ and I got married and she still made it to our wedding.  Actually I think she came directly from the hospital to our wedding, now that’s a woman who knows not to miss a good party.

I spent last night at my sister Janet’s house without her.  Being in her house alone was like a flash back to when I lived alone in DC.  The planes started landing at National at six in the morning waking me and ending any notion I had about sleeping late.  I watched the Sunday morning news shows with greater interest in the Washington insider talk since I was there.

After I took a shower David texted me with that pre-party panic about the birthday brunch and said I was welcome to come early.  It was code for come-over-and-help-me.  David and I have been friends since about 1984.  He was my number one employee at å la Carter, my catering business.  He was the President of Cheese Grating, but he announced to me over text that he was not grating any cheese for today’s party.

I introduced John and David to each other about 1986 so I am their ground zero friend and they have been fast and furious friends ever since.  They have lived together “foreva”.  John had gone to Dickinson with me.  I was a senior and he was a freshman.  He used to follow me around campus and profess his undying love to me.  He often ask me to marry him, once even producing a ring he had made out of a scrap piece of watercolor paper from a painting I had done and thrown out.  I would tell him that I was not the right person, read gender, for him and he would still persist.  Eventually he realized what I knew all along and embraced a world filled with men, as Leisel sang from the Sound of Music.

I arrived at John and David’s fabulous house and of course everything was under control.  The caterer arrived with help and we finished setting up the bloody Mary bar and the fun began.  The slew of fiftieth birthdays that I have attended in the last few years seems surreal.  How could all these people I have known for thirty years or more be 50?  Especially the celebrations for people I don’t see often, like John, we pick right up as if we were in college, but now he actually knows he’s gay.

The quick visit is bitter sweet because it reminds me that I am not as good at keeping up as I would like to be.  How can a person ever stay in touch with all your old friends as you meet and make new ones all the time?  On the other had the best part about old friends is that you pick right up where you left off as if you never missed a day.  Now I am home with my wonderful husband and daughter and I feel like I just experienced some kind of time travel, in a way I did.