Our friendship was only a few years old when I moved from Detroit, where both N and I lived, to Chicago. But it was forged in the kiln of our mutual interest in learning about almost anything.
Which is why when I moved, we decided to schedule adult sleepovers. Leaving husbands and children behind (We both had two preschoolers at the time.), we met overnight in a motel to catch up on each other’s activities and opinions.
We’ve been doing this regularly for almost fifty years and have never run out of things to say. Perhaps it’s because there were phases. There was the stay-at-home Mom phase when our children were young and we were into crafts and kids’ sports and women’s magazines. This period was punctuated by visiting shopping malls, Bill Knapp’s restaurant, and chocolate covered pretzels. Only chocolate covered pretzels remain today.
There was the era when each of us returned to graduate school, N first, to stimulate our brains that had been on hold during the previous phase. And the middle-aged meetings that traded conversations on women’s fashions for health regimes. By then our children were moving out the door, and our husbands were moving toward retirement. Well, at least N’s husband was. So we spent hours wondering what that looked like.
And so it went. Currently we are in the I-can’t-believe-we’re-old phase. But that hasn’t stopped us from talking about politics, religion, our families, and various aches and pains. And yes, our friendship. Our childhoods were markedly different as was the trajectory of our adult lives. Yet, we’ve remained staunch friends.
I have a couple other friends I’ve also known fifty years or more. We work hard to keep in touch and I cherish each of them for their unique qualities. But N and I are the only ones who have had fifty years of sleepovers. Which, by the way, is really a misnomer.
Sleeping is the least of it.
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