strike that

I've Just Seen a Face

Erin and I met in Kindergarten, and we had a secret club in elementary school, and in high school we learned pool from Ralph in the smoky basement hall of the stripmall near her house. We went to different colleges and started drinking and making Poor Decisions and then she moved to Texas and dated boys with gunracks and I moved to Oregon and dated Beth, and she went to medschool and I went to gradschool and suddenly there I was at her wedding wearing a hot pink dress that she maintains was actually “sangria.” But I was there, and it was hot pink.

I think sometimes we forget how far back we go. We feel too young to have known anyone for 25 years, and besides there is so little continuity between our seventh-grade-selves and our current-selves. Thank God, incidentally. We used to be so dorky and stubborn and self-righteous and now… well, now we pull that off much better.

Erin is a doctor. She is a Doctor with a Husband John and Two Dogs Stella and Milo and a House in Charlottesville Virginia. And once a month her New Doctor Schedule involves two consecutive days off, which as luck would have it happened this very weekend just one hour from Richmond.

I assumed that Erin would mostly want to lie about on the couch with John, but instead we did Everything One Could Possibly Do in Two Days in Charlottesville. We sat on her porchswing sucking FlavoIce, toured Jefferson’s UVA campus and the Rotunda, walked the dogs to the lake, strolled the town center’s pedestrian mall, watched an inexcusably bad romantic comedy like we used to every weekend in high school, and ordered three plates of food plus an extra “for the table” at her favorite breakfast place. (There were grits and biscuits and I sure love eating in the South.)

And John – who last year had to sit through one of those old-girlfriends Rambling Pointless Stories about that time around 1990 when we sat in my parent’s yard in the rain and ate a whole knot of string cheese – brought us a knot of string cheese. Which makes it official that Erin married the Right Guy.

On Sunday we went for a Sunday Drive, and I sat in the back seat with the window way down, wind rushing in till my hair was tangled and my mouth was dry and it felt like Summer. We drove by mountain-framed farms and stopped to taste Virginia wine, and sang the Beatles. We sang the best songs twice.

posted by tortaluga @ 10:34 PM