“Like No Time Has Passed”

Barbara: Is that a midlife thing? Running into old acquaintances or meeting up with old friends and standing back and marveling that “it’s as if no time has passed at all”? Or do we all find ourselves doing that?

Well, I can say this for myself: I hear these words coming out of my mouth a lot more now than when I was in my twenties!

But it also really feels like it could be part of the whole space/time continuum thing, you know? That no time has passed. That we’re living everything simultaneously.

Just this weekend, dear college friends who we haven’t seen in at least a decade decided to heed the call of friendship and drive 4 hours so we four could catch up. It was long overdue. No one felt guilty about it, but we all knew it was time to turn back some time.

 We hadn’t been together for more than five minutes before each of us broke into huge grins and announced that, you guessed it, “no time had passed”. We were chatting and laughing and reminiscing and cracking jokes (well, the guys were … as you know, I’m no quipster). And even though of course we looked different, we didn’t look at all different, you know what I mean? Like it was the same gang as 25 years ago, with the same attitudes, wearing the same clothes (I mean, that was the 80s, but I don’t remember any of us rocking shoulder pads or Flock of Seagulls hairdos back then), even looking the same age. It was as if those rose-coloured glasses you always hear about had just popped on and all we could see was our mutual––youthful––love and affection.

Okay, Dave probably had more hair back then. And Phil too. Come to think of it, I probably did too...

Of course, after so much actual time having passed (after all, there are grown children to prove it), there was a lotta catching up to do. Some of it was the “laundry list” of “we lived there then there then here”, and some of it was the major brush strokes, “I did this then that and a little of the other”, and there was definitely some “this was a dark time” and “that was life-changing”. But there was just so much just … hanging out, being silly and laughing like we always did, like it was a Saturday night during the college years, us mawing down at the local Chinese restaurant and scrounging our pennies together to see if we could afford a beer to wash it down.

Thanks, my dear friends Dave and Nancy, for taking the time to visit and for reminding me that as fast as time seems to fly, it can also stand still and marvel.

Deb: This is splendid, Barb, really. What a great and rewarding experience that must have been for you guys. I have a dear friend. Let’s just call her Carol Ann, for that is her name. She and I were friends as little girls and then remained friends through high school and then lost touch. There was never a falling out or even a lack of interest. We just fell away from each other. Over these last ten years, through a series of circumstances and mutual friends, we came together again. And the time I spend with her online and face to face is so special, so connected, that I shake my head with wonder that it wasn’t always thus.