This afternoon I received a text from somewhere in South America (I guess) saying Mark your calendar, party at my house in Spain! Will be extraordinary… promise!
I was thrilled and twirled with excitement, even though there is no way I can get away for the next few months. I can’t even make it to Iain’s birthday celebration in London this week, let alone a lost weekend of wicked debauchery in another country. No childcare, no parties!
Then I remembered that my mother is coming to visit, facilitating my escape… I can fly to Malaga from Prague! I am so endlessly thrilled!
However, the actually extraordinary thing about invitation? It came from someone who attended the same junior high.
The morning I met David in 1984 we were just a motley collection of teenage outcasts standing in line at the waterbed store in a derelict western town, shivering against the cold wet dawn, waiting to buy tickets for the first ever Madonna concert.
Together we listed through the indignities of a junior high run along the lines of a federal prison, and a high school featuring barbed wire and security cameras. We threw Kool-Aid parties when others were getting into crack. While our peers nailed lived kittens to trees, we amused each other with pranks like forking lawns.
It was a perilous, innocent, awful time, and when we parted at age eighteen we were separately fleeing not just the town but our respective dates, families, lives.
We were lost to each other from that day until just recently – and only then because he lives in London and I live in Cambridge. Who would have dreamed how far we would go? Who would have guessed we had the capacity to grow into adults who are actually more playful and delighted and determined than we were at age thirteen?
Not me, for sure.
I didn’t even think we would stay alive long enough to cross the county line. Oh, how I adore David!