Of Heart Attacks and Hysterectomies and Unforgotten Youth

Last Friday I spent the evening with two old friends - actually friends I had known since junior high. They were high school sweethearts and after college they eventually married and I was the maid of honor for their wedding.

In the year of 1975, I was maid of honor for three weddings. At the time I was beginning to think, "Always the bride’s maid and never the bride." And out of those three weddings, the "high school sweethearts" happen to be the only couple still married - - over 30 years now.

You see, that day was a bitter-sweet event. Sweet for the evening of being with old friends while sharing memories and catching up on family news. But, bitter for the day that brought us together for a memorial service for one of their parents.

That evening, we talked of family trips when we were teenagers. She went with us on our family summer trips to Montana and I went with her family to their cabin in the Wallowas. After my own father had died, her father was very kind to me. At the time, he was president of the school board and when he had to attend a meeting in Seattle, he and his wife would include me so I could visit and stay with their daughter, my friend, who was going to college in Seattle.

We shared our memories over delivery pizza and wine: rock concerts of Jethro Tull, Grateful Dead, CSN & Y and Maria Muldaur. We commented, how the middle-aged often do, about the changing world remembering when there was a day we would pick up other concert-going hitchhikers in our friend’s VW van and now, he wouldn’t think of picking up a stranger in his Subaru SUV. We laughed at how we would torture our older siblings, especially the professional violinist sister and how we made coyote calls of "yip-yip-yip-yeeeooowwww" whenever she was practicing.

We talked about our current life. Me, starting my life over after a divorce and her current frustrations of being diagnosed with a crippling disease. The three of us chatted of our personal experiences of heart attacks and hysterectomies, but how our brains were still in the mode of free spirited youths.

And during our time together, we realized it was an evening that was no different than the many we shared together in our youth over delivery pizza and wine - except with one very distinct difference - the wine. Those days of Spanada and Annie Green Springs are long behind us as we shared bottles of Forgeron Cellars Klipsun Vineyard Merlot and Woodward Canyon Estate Red.

If we couldn't have our youthful bodies back and some of those idealistic times, at least it was the wine that changed for the better.