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Sitting on the park bench like bookends.
I was 14 when Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends album came out, and I listened to it on repeat. The whole album is wonderful (Mrs. Robinson, anyone? or America?) but the Old Friends track seared itself into my very being.
An awkward and insecure freshman in high school, I pitied those old friends sitting on the park bench like bookends. Lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sunset. I wept that their lives had come to this as they reached age 70.
Oh, Paul and Art. I know you're not speaking to each other these days (or maybe you are?) but I'm so sorry you missed all those years of friendship. If you had you might have written a much different anthem.
Last week a pair of old friends and I celebrated that this year we're all turning 70, and the week involved not one newspaper blown through the grass to settle on the round toes of our high shoes.*
We are a different variety of old friends.
I have three friends who have been in my life since junior high. While I still regret that as a country kid I had missed the townie activities they shared in grade school, we bonded over pep club and music activities and warped senses of humor and the scandalous nature of Romeo and Juliet. After we graduated from high school we scattered to other lives, and it wasn't until we were turning 40 that we reconnected. Since then we've kept in touch and for the last couple of decades we're tried to get away for a couple of days every year.
Our last big get-together, one that involved airline flights and a VRBO, was in January 2020. On that occasion we decided we were going to do A Big Trip the following year. Savannah, we thought. A place with activities and good coffee and a different vibe from our homes in Kansas, Alaska, and Colorado.
The following year, of course, those plans had been stamped with a big red "NOPE. NOT DOING THAT." We were sequestered at home, whipping up masks from left-over fabric in our sewing rooms, and no way were we taking a trip. So we began our own little four-person book club and have Zoomed monthly since then as we plowed through a variety of books I never would have read otherwise.
Next year, Savannah, we kept promising each other as the years went on. And just as we were cautiously stepping out of our homes, blinking and shading our eyes in the sunshine, my hip committed ritual disintegration. It wasn't until this year that we could even begin to dream of a birthdays trip, and my recovery from hip replacement narrowed our options. (I'll be updating on that next post, I promise.) So we ended up close to home. One of the old friends had booked a trip to Japan during the same time period as our get-together and she urged us to not cancel, so last week the three of us were together for an Old Friends Turn 70 party..
One of our trio has a relative who works for a fancy-dancy hotel in the Big City near Small Town, and she was able to get us friends-and-family rates on the kind of lodgings I had always assumed I'd frequent when I was 70. And even though I'm still a couple of weeks from hitting that milestone, I am now claiming fancy-dancy hotels as a perk of my age.
For four days we ate our way through everything the Big City had to offer on a two-meal-a-day plus snacks schedule. We hit the art museum and toured a Frank Lloyd Wright house and wandered through the botanical garden. We stopped at famous local shops (Nifty Nut House, Spice Merchant) and were appalled to find out that one of the group had never tasted a NuWay sandwich (crumbled hamburger) so that afternoon's snack was root beer floats and a NuWay burger split three ways.
The downtown location of our hotel meant we were able to walk much of the time and I managed to put 7,500 steps a day on my Apple watch. This doesn't sound like much, but my new hip was proud of itself.
And we talked. We talked, and talked, and talked.
How did we feel about turning 70? Mostly absolutely fine, although we are now much more aware that we need to be making good choices about how we spend our time because there simply aren't enough years left for everything on our bucket lists.
How are we physically? Not bad. But what are those weird bright-red bruises that pop up if we even think of brushing the corner of a cabinet door? And why won't they go away? Also, how much would it cost to get these droopy eyelids hoisted back up to where they belong? Have you figured out what to do about the nighttime leg cramps? Etc., etc., etc.
How are our families? Our hearts? Our souls?
We laughed until we cried about the dumbest things, including the time C. and I tried to get in the wrong white cross-over SUV outside the restaurant while D. stood watching us in bewilderment from her car three cars away. It was exactly the same kind of thing that would have had us in hysterics in high school.
In other words, it was nothing like the melancholy Old Friends ennui I had dreaded as a teenager. I would have marveled at how these friends, at an age I would have considered death-adjacent, are living with joy and energy.
How terribly strange to be 70.
*Trigger warning: The lyrics of Old Friends may make you weep every single time you hear the song. (Or that may just be me.)
