I have lunch with my friend from the village days. Now that our village is so hectic and touristy we drive out to another smaller, calmer village where it is easy to get a car park. My friend chooses beetroot soup from the menu. The colour is dazzling.
We met back in the days when our daughters were friends in high school. We shake our heads when we realise how long ago that is now.
“When I need to go to a doctor,” my friend says, “and they ask me on the phone if I have a preference for who I see, I say no, I don’t care, as long as it’s someone over 50.”
I have lunch with my friend from my own high school days. We have known each other for decades. Many of them. We meet up in the old school neighbourhood which is so bustling and busy and huge now we could be somewhere else altogether. It is hard finding a connection but we know what used be there, and on that corner there, back in the day.
We discuss a piece of news a doctor has given me. That the average life expectancy for a woman in our time and place is 83 years of age. It gives us pause. We circle and skirt and hesitate around the question, “What’s your plan then, for the next bit?”
“It’s all very well, the plans,” my friend says, “but don’t forget the money. You need the money, to do things.” And then we agree on the health, too.
I have lunch with my friend from one of my best and favourite jobs. She didn’t have children when we met, but she was very understanding and accepting and tolerant of our small ones. Now she shares a house with her very own young adults. Now she has another job. Now she works in the same place as my daughter.
She is approaching the age her father was at the time of his sudden and shocking death. I am way past the too young age my father was at his own. I know the implications. We talk about the things that come up, the things that mean something, the things that matter so much about fathers and the losing of them.
Who knows all the reasons for and all the machinations of friendships? The way some friends don’t last and disappear from our lives, slip through the cracks before we even notice they’re gone, once the everydayness is lost? The whys some friendships endure, through thick and thin, sickness and health, good times and bad, kilometres, places, partners, circumstances?
At the beginning, when you’re introduced to someone, when you’re getting to know them, could you imagine if they’ll still be there as the years whizz past and life happens to and for your both?
Could you imagine the old and grey bit, the trousers rolled bit, when you do lunch every once in a while and still talk about the things that truly matter, even when those things have changed so much?
And could you imagine still laughing out aloud at things together too? The same things. And different ones too.
It is a strange beast, friendship. And when it works, a brilliant one.
RosieL
endgame 