About ten years ago, I wrote an essay about my childhood friend Carol, whom I’ve known since sixth grade. She was eleven and I was ten when we met. I just spent the last three days with her and feel an update is in order.
The first time I wrote about us, we had both recently buried our mothers and sent emails back and forth recalling our school days in the hope of adding memories to our mutual losses. After all, as only children we clung to each other because each of us remembered the other’s mother like a sister would.
Carol’s mother was beautiful; mine was more accomplished, at least academically. Both of them wanted the best for their daughters, although they exhibited this in acutely different ways. On this most recent get-together we recalled our mothers, their deaths, and what they left as legacies to us. We almost always do this when we get together, as there is no one else who knows Carol and me firsthand as emerging teens with hormonal urges and concerned mothers. We were co-conspirators then, and we are now.
More than once we also touched on the subject of aging, as Carol and I have been friends over fifty years and have shared each other’s ups and downs. It amazes me we are now moving into the realm of senior citizens, having endured early marriage, the births of our children, their own growing up, and the health issues that can accompany membership in AARP. Slowly and steadily we are gaining on the ages our mothers were when they died. “Don’t you know eighty is the new sixty?” Carol said. “So sixty must be the new forty.”
We laughed. Let’s face it; neither of us feels forty, but when we’re together I hope she feels as young as I do. Whatever age that is. We reminisced, we analyzed, we hugged.
The last paragraph of my earlier essay ends like this: “Recently we made a pact that when her husband and my significant are gone we will move in with each other. Carol will cook because she loves to, and I will clean. And we will be old women together.”
But not quite yet . . .
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