Passing Ships

So this friend's dying has gotten to me. I'm still sorting out how I feel about it.

There's that and there's our being about to go on a six week grand tour of sorts, which may be a kind of milestone for me since 1) I've never done anything quite like it; and 2) it is something made possible by my no longer being full time employed, so it puts a sharp underline on my new status.

Then as part of the organizing for the trip my wife thought we should set up a blog we can post to while we travel. Okay. So that's done. As part of that I sent the link out to the folks who have expressed some interest about our journey and some old friends.

I heard back from one of them quite quickly. A colleague from my old stomping grounds: we had been each other's date of convenience during my single periods in the eighties. We were both divorced, both had kids about the same age--hers two girls, me two boys--and we moved in the same circles. I think I probably had wished at different points that it could have been more as she was quite attractive in a very whitebread kind of way. She was pretty clear it couldn't be and teased me a bit about how many attractive women I always seemed to be with. BTW, it never seemed that way to me. I remember that being a pretty arid time for me.

Anyway she pops back that she is on her was to Texas to marry her high school sweetheart. So there's a change. Originally from that part of the world, she had lived and worked in New England for most of her adult life.

Here's the other piece of this weaving. She was the one who introduced me to my friend who just died. When I came west, she thought he would be a good connection for me, which he was of course.

So weave three lives. We are all about the same age, born right at the beginning of the baby boom, maybe just a bit earlier. Similar careers in the same field, and who had families on about the same arc. Don's girls were adopted and a little younger and as far as I know he was married to the same woman, while Linda and I were both divorced around the same time.

The three lives could be marked as parallel arcs up until right now, when Don's ends, Linda's makes a sharp turn, and mine a slighter turn but quite different than hers or his. The image I think of is like a braided contrail that splits and forks at its apogee.