I asked Bing Image Creator for "Two 70 year old women with short grey hair and wearing glasses, holding tea cups, sitting and chatting, in the style of Matisse". None of these images really resemble neither me nor my friend very much at all - but I find the "Matisse" twist a refreshing change from the "cartoon" style that I've usually asked Bing for! :)
A friend of mine since nearly 50 years got in touch recently and said she'd be in my town for a few days, working. She's an optician by profession; retired since a few years, but substituting now and then. And the chain she used to work for has shops in various cities; so sometimes she makes it into a kind of "working holiday" to go and help out somewhere different than in her own home town, for a week or so.
Anyway, this time her stay also included a work free Sunday. So I invited her to spend part of that day with me. She came to me for lunch, and as we had a lot to catch up on, she also stayed on for afternoon tea before she went back to her hotel.
We got to know one another in our early twenties up in Karlstad (where we both lived back then), via a church and a youth gospel choir there. Now we are both turning 70 in August. Hard to grasp!!
The last time we met was a couple of years "before the pandemic". During the course of our conversation this afternoon we found ourselves using "before/after the pandemic" as a time marker so many times that it struck us both that covid really did bring about quite a few changes in people's social lives (both our own and other friends').
Over the last seven years or so, we have also both lost quite a few mutual old friends (although not actually to covid, I think). So there was a lot to reminisce about.
And as many times before in later years (whenever getting together with other old friends approaching 70), I was once again reminded of Simon & Garfunkel's song Old Friends/Bookends. Even if today was a summer Sunday, and we were sitting indoors rather than outdoors on a park bench (and it was definitely not cold outside either!)
Old friends
Sat on their park bench
Like bookends
Years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange
To be seventy
Old friends
Memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fears
Time it was
And what a time it was
It was . . .
A time of innocence
A time of confidences
Long ago . . . it must be . . .
I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They're all that's left you
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A truly meaningful reunion much like turning the pages of a cherished album of shared memories, accompanied by tea and conversation, quietly echoing the sentiment of Old Friends despite the summer setting and the years that have passed
ReplyDeleteThe song is perfect for this post. Yes, it seems that more and more we define time by before or after covid.
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