Old friends

Two Friends by Daniel Ridgeway Knight

This was a weekend for catching up with old friends. On Friday, I had lunch at my friend Sandra’s house. I’ve known her since our oldest kids were in the same 1st grade class together, and 2nd grade...and 3rd. Ironically, we rarely see each anymore even though she seriously lives 2 blocks away from me. But since I discovered she had a blog several weeks ago, we’ve had a chance to chat more and catch up on each other’s lives online. Isn’t life funny?

Sandra has kept a blog for almost 3 years now and hers is more like a journal where she processes the day’s events and shares insightful thoughts about her children (she’s a great, sensitive mother). I had originally intended to do more daily, record-keeping kinds of posts on my blog, but strangely it has taken on a life of its own. Do you ever feel that way? Like your blog is the one driving the bus and you are merely a passenger – standing towards the back, yanking on the cord yelling “Dude, I think that was my stop back there!....Hey you’re not taking us in there are you?...Wait, this wasn’t where I planned to go at all!”

Perhaps I’ll do more “Dear Diary” type writing in the future. But often my life is too dull to inflict on an audience - or too emotionally raw to possibly distill into an honest entry. And then there are those days when I’m so stinking busy that I don’t have time to write at all. Today was one of those days. We cleaned the house and sorted through boxes and ran errands and got home literally 5 minutes before our dinner guests were due to arrive. Luckily our guests were another couple of old friends who would never complain about the Cheerios on the floor or the fact that we hadn’t even ordered the pizza yet when they got here.

We’ve known Dave and Sheri for 17 years. In fact my kids owe Dave their very lives since he’s the one who introduced me to their father (who by the way insisted at the time that his name was Ken Massengill, but that’s another story). Dave and Ken (whose name was thankfully not Massengill or I would have given more thought to keeping my maiden name) were quite a couple of ruffians when we all hung out together in college. (Well about as ruffian-esque as a couple of Mormon boys at a Mormon university could get.) They were certainly a bad influence on me since for the first week of Political Science 170, I sat in the front row, dutifully taking notes, but once I was sucked into their vortex of delinquency I spent the rest of the semester on the back row passing silly notes and caricatures of the professor back and forth. A few months ago I came across the folder from that class. I tossed all the Political Science papers. But the notes -- those I’ll save forever.