A 40th Friendiversary Celebrated

As longer time readers of this blog may recall, last year I, along with my friends The Actor and Uisdean Ruadh, celebrated our 40th year as friends.  This sort of thing seems to happen less and less, at least in my own life - I cannot think of anyone else that would come close to that amount of time these days - so we had fully intended to make plans to celebrate.

Then, of course, life happened.  Uisdean Ruadh and his mother both got expelled from their homes and then relocated.  Not too long after that, TB the Elder passed.  Then Summer ended and we all got trapped back into the web of the common work week.

Until this past Monday when a combination of factors - me being at The Ranch and all of us having a day off - presented itself.  And so, we celebrated.

"Celebrated" is a pretty elaborate term for what we actually did.  

We all met at the high school we graduated from to walk around and take pictures.  The school still looks somewhat the same in form, although they have added buildings where parking and basketball courts used to be and entire buildings have been pulled down and rebuilt.  We could still reel off the names of teachers we had and where they taught.  We took our picture in front of the theater which was really the center of our existence during high school as well as the music building (or at least where the music building is now).

The day was overcast but not terribly rainy and because of the holiday, we had the campus largely to ourselves, which both made for good pictures and good memories.  We crossed the paths and streets we had undoubtedly run or walked hundreds of times in years gone by - for me at least, this was the first time in almost forty years I had done more than just drive by the campus.

After our visit and photo shoot, we adjourned to a local lunch place where we ate lunch, divided up a box of forty cookies (our celebratory portion), and talked.  The talk was perhaps a little more about high school but was much more about the now:  how children were doing, our health, options about what we were thinking about doing after "work"  - the sorts of things friends discuss when they are together.  By common unspoken consent, we largely avoided current events and the real world (we always try to), as it can create issues where there need be done.

We parted after lunch - the Actor to continue his work of chain-sawing downed trees, Uisdean Ruadh and I back to The Ranch where visited for another two hours and watched the rain fall.

It was a good day.  And almost the perfect way to celebrate forty years of being together.