The GT Reunion Tour

I met an old friend for lunch today.  She's not old, the friendship is.  28 years old, actually.  She is one of my favorite people ever.  Catching up with her is effortless.  Probably because we know each other's backstory.  There is no time wasted on explaining things to death.  We would be considered "very high context characters" among the literati.  And yet we can talk non-stop for hours and hours and still feel like there is so much more to say that we had better have lunch again soon.  

She was my partner in crime back in the day.  All of my Junior High Plotting was done with her.  We pissed off our Gym Teachers when we campaigned to be allowed to choose wrestling during an elective unit.  We even wrote a letter to the editor at Verne Gagne's (that's Verne up there posing!) Pro Wrestling Report and got PUBLISHED!!  That really made them mad.  Having a mild crush on the teacher/wrestling coach had nothing to do with it!

We also learned valuable life lessons about Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, and the Right to Plea the Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating oneself during our stint on the school paper.  We wrote a scathing report on the quality of the school lunches and published it anonymously.  The lunch ladies pressured the English Teacher to tell them who wrote it and she protected her reporters like any editor would.  When the lunch ladies spent a full week staring down and questioning the newspaper staff in the lunchroom, no one ratted us out.  What, exactly, we were afraid they would do to us I am not sure.  It was the principle of the matter.

Oh, and we got kicked out of the church children's choir together.  Our director told us, I am not joking, that she was as close to God as you could get so we had better be respectful.  Well, what could we do with that?  Of course we pointed out the flaws in her argument.  That ex-nun needed knocking down a few pegs and we were just the gals for the job.  At least we had made it through the Rogers and Hammerstein Review.  I sing those songs all the time!  Yah, we thought that ex-nun music director (who lived with Miss. R, our sixth grade teacher...hmmm?) was re-living her failed dreams through us too.  She would have been a happier person had she run away to Broadway with a lady-friend instead of running to the convent.

Once, when my friend was home alone, she called me because she had heard a noise like someone in the basement.  I was also home alone.  But I grabbed a steak knife and rode my bike over there (in the days when nobody wore helmets and a girl on a bike with a knife in her hand didn't shock anyone) and we searched the house together.  I would even get up early and walk to her house to french braid her hair in the morning before school.  I still have my souvenirs from the US Hockey Hall of Fame and Iron World Museum from the trip where we spent days on an inner tube in the lake and even proved that Ivory soap can, in fact, sink.  

All of our major milestones have happened together, even when those milestones pointed us in different directions.  We went from Cabbage Patch Kids and bicycles to first boyfriends and cars.   From college to marriage to motherhood.  We talk about our parents and our sisters and our friends and our husbands and our kids.  About our own bad decisions and the good ones too.  There is something very wonderful about connecting with an old friend.  I feel all sassy and 13 again.  I highly recommend it!