old friends

We're home from hill and sea, this final day of the year. We're on the cusp, tiptoe-gazing toward all that might soon appear. Because I can pause to ponder changes, I kiss Tim goodbye at the door, delay getting dressed and ticking off my list, in order to excavate a little for meaning.

Friday night Tim and I left for Washington state, our main objective to attend Saturday's memorial service for a dear old friend. Old in the sense all our friends from that group are, as in long-time. We first met amid stormish days: learning to drive, cheering school teams, falling in love and out again, moping, singing, dancing, praying, repeatedly viewing Star Wars and Steve Martin.

The friend who died--his heart failed days after Thanksgiving--had been to me like a big brother, fun-loving yet more mature than most of us. He was ever-faithful to his girlfriend, who became his wife three months before Tim and I married (at our wedding, the two of them sang "Evergreen"). His younger sister, Anna, along with her husband, Doug, hosted Tim and me ten years ago in Germany while they were living there.

I knew I'd see friends at the service who have long been in my heart but not in view. All who could rallied together, including our amazing choir director from those years. Differences in appearance gave way after moments of conversation to remembered gestures and phrases. It's a phenomenon social media can't imitate. It's the encounter of the whole. With someone from long ago, from years as intense as those were, memories amazingly overlay and underscore everything.

We were on the cusp, in those old days, of our futures. We assumed, as I do each New Year, that whatever was coming would spring from what had always been. We would make it so--or it would make us--according to what we'd experienced thus far in our brief trajectory. We were right. And we were very wrong. That would prove hard but also wonderful.

Sunday Tim and I stopped at Vashon Island to visit dear Abbot Tryphon and the other monks at All-Merciful Saviour Monastery. During the morning liturgy, old friends' faces filled my heart--not just the humans but also those of waterways in and around the Salish Sea. Intense was my encounter with them years ago. All their memories overlay and underscore the inner workings of my soul. Yet I'm still discovering--even here on the cusp of old age, of being right and very wrong again in the future--that the hard stuff contains the wonderful. For this may I remain grateful.

Now I must go get dressed.