If there is one especially good thing about getting older, it must surely be that older people have more old friends, or rather, older people have more time in which to make friends, lose touch, and reconnect. You sit round a lunch table with three former colleagues, realizing with a shock that the four of you may not have shared a lunch table since 1986, or was it 1985? You share a pasta lunch, warmed by glasses of fragrant wine. And twenty years falls away, just like that. You don’t really know each other any more, at least not all the facts, the gritty details that fill up the moments and years of our lives. But you do know each other, at some deeper level. Being together feels strange yet familiar at the same time.
A lunch is a very brief thing. There is insufficient time even for news of the big things, the details of falling in love, the report on where you’ve been lately. There is no time at all for gossip.
And you leave the restaurant knowing these dear people are still there for you. When you have more time, you can call upon them, bring them back from the past. In the present, a new present with new details, you will still love them, because they are the same people who gave you so much joy in the first place.
1 comment:
What I would give to share a lunch with you. I have really enjoyed your BLOG. Each and everyone unearths very pleasant memories. MEM
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