Common Sense, Dancing

I’m trying to tell you something about my life
Maybe give me insight between black and white
The best thing you’ve ever done for me
Is to help me take my life less seriously, it’s only life after all…
 
…There’s more than one answer to these questions
pointing me in crooked line
The less I seek my source for some definitive
The closer I am to fine.
    (thanks Indigo Girls)

Being togther with my old high school pal MA in Nova Scotia last week brought back a lot of memories. I never went up to NS with MA during the summers — she did take a different friend or two a time or two — we joked about how my life would have been different had I experienced a “running free” kind of summer during my formative years. I listened to the stories last week in much the same way that I had listened to stories in high school about things I didn’t do, places I didn’t go, escapades I didn’t participate in. I listened last week, as I did back then during high school, not with a sense of regret (“oh, I wish I had been there,”) but more with the sense that I knew — even all those years ago — what my own personal limitations were; that there were things I couldn’t (wouldn’t?) ever do because they just weren’t in my DNA. In many ways,  lived vicariously through MA in high school (and beyond, perhaps?). She helped me — and helps me — find the lightness, absurdity, and silliness in myself.

Another high school memory presented itself — almost live and in color: A mutual friend from high school now works and lives in Halifax, having moved with his wife and young family from the States about a year ago. One of us dated him, one of us was simply a very good friend, and both of us were hopeful we would see him after having all gone our separate ways in the decades after high school. As it turned out, his schedule didn’t permit time to connect in person but he called while we were making our way back to Halifax at the end of the week. When I answered the “unknown” call on my cell and heard his voice, I was transported back 25 years.

His familiar greeting (he never said “Hello”) was a bit of a shock to my system — I don’t think there are too many people who I can identify with certainty in 3 syllables or less. It occured to me during the conversation that he and I have known each other for probably more than 30 years.  His and my friendship was different than his and MA’s — not better, but different — and I am hopeful that we will connect in person before too much more time passes. (I heard, via MA during this trip, that there was a point in his younger life when he  had long hair — I somehow missed this period and I am looking forward to seeing him in person to find out just what the hell he was thinking back then. I’ll give him a beer first, to loosen him up.)

As long friendships do, this one grew and changed, waxed and waned, and in recent years we had lost track of each other. With the advent of Facebook, it is relatively difficult to stay lost and so we are now “Friends” again and reconnected. (Well, we were “Friends” until Mr. HackerAsshat took over my FB page and FB security pulled it down.) But as we talked the other day on the phone, I realized as I asked a million questions — and he asked only a few thousand– that what I had suspected all along was true: he was (is) great, I was great then (and, ahem, now), and that we are right now where we are supposed to be. I am happy to know for sure right now that back then I was also right where I was supposed to be — not dating the football hero (not dating anyone in fact), editing the yearbook, reading and writing (too much?) in AP classes, looking ahead to college. Who I was back then — everyone’s “Friend” — may not have felt great in 1985 but turns out was really good for the me that grew up to live as a 41 year old in 2010, with the most awesome husband and four pretty fantastic children, two (sometimes 3) dogs, and a wonderful home in Princeton.

This girl’s alright.

I had a great time in Nova Scotia last week.  MA and I were on a “working vacation” and we worked hard — in between breaks for old friends dropping by, rarely seen cousins stopping in, and prospective cottage buyers pulling into the driveway for tours.

What were we working on? MA’s mother grew up in a small town on the northern coast of Nova Scotia, about 2 hours from Halifax. When MA was in grammar school, her parents returned to town, bought a couple of acres and built a cottage. There, MA spent her summers running amok with local kids, learning to waterski, how to sneak out of skylights, and the best way to mix rum with various and assorted juices. It was a full-curriculum summer school for many years. The annual visits became fewer and farther between, until MA’s mother died at the end of the summer after we graduated college (in the early 90’s). The cottage remained mostly empty, save for a few summer visits from MA and me, her own young family, and her father (but infrequently). The day had now come to sell the cottage, and so we went up to clean it out and get it empty, ready for the next phase of its life.

It was hard to empty the home that was really her mother’s place. Her presence was all over the cottage. We boxed up cookbooks with her handwritten notes, a quilt that she had made, found blueprints for a bar that she had planned to build in a downstairs corner, newspapers that contained notices of her participation in town events. It was also full of elements of MA’s childhood — and education. We gazed up at skylights that MA’s friend figured out how to climb out of, peered under the deck where they hid –MA and co. — when breaking curfew, looked out over the Harbor at “Southside” where two barns and a small farm house glowed with the setting sun.

There was a lot of finality to the four days in town. MA noted that she was able to close some of her “circles:”  We met the new baby that Cousin D and his wife gave birth to almost 18 months ago (“baby,” used loosely) — and heard stories of why this cousin wasn’t talking to that cousin, what happened to this aunt or that uncle, who was still married and who had moved on. We stayed at the B&B of dear friends of MA who served as a second set of parents during those summers long ago — the man who drove the boat when she learned to waterski, the woman who opened the door to MA bearing freshly picked raspberries and begging for a pie. We sat on the deck of the summer cottage (and started Happy Hour about five hours earlier than customary) with MA’s oldest and dearest “townie” friend: the now 40-year old “boy” who proclaimed MA his first love but has enough sense of history — and of himself — to be happy for the wild summers of innocent fun and fond memories of staying out too late, of mostly innocent “partying” down on the shoreline, of holding hands under a tarp in a trailered boat in his dad’s driveway. She revisited lots of circles.

As the sun set over the harbor on our last evening at the cottage, and as we watched the two barns on that far away farm glow with orange light, I was wistful for MA and her summer memories. She  is far removed from those carefree summers (we all are, in our own ways), but she treasures them enough to both close the book on them with a smile andfigure out a way to get her kids to a similar kind of summer place where they can learn to waterski, climb out skylights, and pull one over on her on harmless summer nights spent with townie friends running wild.