LS Place Home

07/05/2002

An Old Friend

Go On, Go Home
Next?
Last?
Send Me Love

I went out to lunch with a very old friend today.

I don't mean that my friend was very old. I mean that I became friends with her a long time ago. Actually, she was my first real girlfriend. We "dated" for a few months. As much as anyone can date when they are 13 or 14. Then we realized that we were much better at being friends than we were being romantic. Although, to be fair, I wasn't very good at being romantic at all, nevermind with anyone in particular. But we were both part of a "gang" of friends that hung around in various configurations and always stayed close.

Robin (my friend) and her boyfriend had moved to Maine a few years after graduation. They later got married there and had a daughter. She hadn't been down this way in a while and I lost contact with her. Then she joined Classmates.com around the time of our 20th high school reunion. She wasn't able to attend the reunion but we did start e-mailing. She told me that she would be trying to come down to New Jersey for the July 4th weekend. Mainly because one of the members of the aforementioned gang of friends was throwing a 4th of July party that was also serving as an informal reunion of that gang. I told her to let me know when she would be around so we could get together.

And so she did. Robin called me Wednesday afternoon from her mom's house; she was already in New Jersey. She had driven down that day with her daughter and her daughter's friend (both about 13 or 14 years old). She had a jam packed schedule so we made plans to talk on Friday (today) to make plans. And those plans turned out to be lunch at a diner. I offered to take her out somewhere other than a diner, but she said she needed a Taylor Ham fix. Apparently, you can't really get Taylor Ham in Maine. I don't know why I'm capitalizing Taylor Ham. Anyway, the plan was that I would meet Robin and her daughter's friend at the diner. I thought this was odd, but I didn't really care. As it was later explained to me Robin engineered it that way so that Renee (Robin's daughter) could spend some quality alone time with her grandmother. And that made perfect sense.

Robin and I fell into conversation as easily as we ever had. I was able to talk to her as if we had never spent anytime apart. She was still just as funny as I remembered. We caught up with our each other's personal situations and just talked about random stuff. A nice surprise was Robin's daughter's friend, Brittany. I don't remember being as conversant at 13 or 14 as Brittany. She was pretty cool and very polite since she was stuck there with her friend's mom and some guy she never met before while thay were talking about stuff she's never heard about before.

As we were preparing to leave, Robin filled me in some more about this 4th of July party that was being thrown. I wasn't actually invited to this party for a couple of reasons. First, I kind of lost contact with most of that gang a long while ago. Second, I seem to remember a falling out with the guy that was throwing the party. But for the life of me, I can't remember what the whole thing was about exactly. But Robin kept telling me that I should definetly go because she and I didn't get to spend enough time together at lunch. She also told me some of the other people who were invited to this party. So I decided that I should make an attempt to wrangle an invitation to that party.

CLIFFHANGER: Tune into the next entry to see what happens next