Friends

 When we met, my girl might have been three and their first son  might have been a year...give or take a bit.

 I had traded friends with a then friend. She got P., I think, and I got J. who is married to E. and who were, and still are, my exemplary married friends.  Lucky me.

She and I sat in their kitchen in a Park Slope brownstone that they were renovating, drinking coffee, until one of us had to break the conversation to pee. It was heaven. Often I snuck over there to Brooklyn when my daughter was in daycare, on days when I wasn't printing in my friend Will's darkroom on 9th Street. He was teaching me what would make my becoming a teacher possible...excellent darkroom practice, the technical skills I probably wouldn't have absorbed from a less patient, kindly teacher. And J. was teaching me about writing with her patient reading of so much of what I wrote...reading and commenting.

 They moved from Brooklyn, to Beirut, to the environs of Washington, D.C. and most recently to Providence. Where we imaged we'd see each other more often.

She's become wonderfully busy ... I say wonderfully because the organization she's joined has surely benefited from her prioritizing skills, her clear-headed ability to sort through problems and her low-key, well-honed ability to sort out difficult problems and set a tone that makes conciliation possible.

But she's very busy. And I'm busy, too, though not as focused on one specific set of problems, with specific goals.

 As always, I roam all over the map, getting myself tanged into projects and problems. Getting tired. And thinking that even getting on a train to visit them is too much trouble. "I have to think about it" which means that I have to decided whether I've recovered from whatever mess I've gotten into that's knocked my muscles into screams. The latest has been the de-cluttering which is combined with .... and ....and .....and .......(all things that needed to be done, a book to be read, notes to be made, questions to be thought up, photographs to be taken, a meeting to be chaired....and so on...)

 I couldn't believe how easy it was, how pleasant the train was and how quickly those hours at their house went by, that my friends are still my friends....comfortable, talkative, as if we had seen each other just the other day, been talking over the phone constantly instead of occasionally. I had to pinch myself to imagine this is possible and to stop myself from feeling endlessly guilty about how detached I've become.......how distant........

 What a cake, hazelnut and dark chocolate. And coffee............. (in addition to lunch.)

Heaven!