Fun in the Sun!
April 28, 2008
Finally! I’ve finally visited Best Friend and her husband!
I was feeling rather low and lonely on Saturday so BF urged me to come visit them. They are two hundred miles away, so I felt my usual reluctance to splurge that much on gas with prices bounding ever closer to $4.00/gal, but she pitched me a sell I couldn’t resist.
It’s hot? We’ll go to the beach.
You have laundry? Bring it with you.
You’re bored? We’ll take you to the Strawberry festival, watch movies, and hang out.
I also still had their wedding gifts and anniversary cake that I’d been keeping in our freezer for them. And magazines for her to read (recycling my Lucky mags). And … I hadn’t seen them in three months. Hadn’t seen their puppy since I puppy-sat.
I threw a bag of overnight things together, gathered my laundry (hey, it’s got to get done somehow!), gathered their gifts and cake, and went to take my hit at the gas pump. $31 later, I was on my merry, spontaneous way up to the Central Coast! The funniest part of the drive was not really knowing anything about where I was headed: I’d just asked her to email directions so I could check them on my iPhone, but I’m crap at geography so I never did really know where her new home was in relation to everything else.
I left at 1pm and got there after 4, so we played with the dog and cleared up some mess in their backyard before heading out to dinner. They had clam chowder in bread bowls and I had a calamari steak sandwich with a salad. I wish I liked clams, their chowder smelled great!
We walked the pier, and then on the beach until sunset, and her husband took about a dozen pictures of us, our dirty bare feet, and the ladybugs that were swarming the tideline and festooning our hands and feet.
We had a truly lazy Sunday: we watched her husband play video games, I played with the dog, BF read her magazine and drank her coffee. Eventually we had breakfast and headed out tidepooling. I made the mistake of dressing for the real beach in my bathing suit, tshirt and shorts, and darn near froze to death out on the rocks! I chased the dog up and down the dirt track for a while to warm up, and huddled in my beach towel for a while until the sun warmed up. We found half a dozen starfish, and the dog pissed off an entire colony of hermit crabs when she went splashing through their pool. She didn’t land on them, just on the rocks they sheltered under, but they all started scurrying around, some waving their claws as though they were scolding her. It was cute.
We had delicious Cajun Bacon Cheeseburgers for lunch, though I couldn’t tell you what was Cajun about it, and spent part of the afternoon cleaning up our mess, the dog’s yakked up lunch because she’d swallowed so much salt water, and going through junior high and high school notebooks. We had good giggles over how silly we were as kids, and ruminated about how things have changed over the past fifteen years. We’ve been together a loooong time …. it’s so weird to realize that we’re old enough that she’s married. With a house. That she lives in with her husband. I know it seems an elementary concept to most people: you get older, meet someone you care about, get married and move out. Or some variation on that theme. But consider the oft-dramatized notion of the best friend as collateral damage of weddings; there’s at least a little grain of truth in that trope. It’s not quite that traumatic, but I have been within walking distance of her/parents’ home for as long as I’ve been social enough to have friends (5th grade). We walked home from school together, went riding, went on field trips, went through all kinds of childhood and pubescent drama, we did everything together for years. We even went to college together. And now she’s two freaking hundred miles away and I have to drive at least 3 hours just to see her in person. I really miss being able to just drop in at her house up the street and hanging out until she got home from work, or knowing that I could call her in a crisis and that she’d be there in less than ten minutes. Now … now we’re adults. It’s definitely taking some getting used to. She’s got a great husband, bless his heart, and there’s no one I’d rather have “lost” her to.
Whoops, this started out as an ode to the weekend, and has transformed into a rather maudlin ode to the passage of time and friendship. Oh well, it’s part of what made the weekend good; remembering our journey up to this point as we both enter new stages in our lives. We talked a lot, and it’s been a while since we’ve been able to do that.
