Re-kindling a conversation

The conversation was interrupted.
But only for 40 years.
Back in the fall of 1967, my wife went off to college as a young girl from Illinois.
Her roommate that fall was a girl from the Pittsburgh area.
Next door, there were a girl from Spiceland, Ind., and a girl from suburban Columbus, Ohio.
All of them were freshmen, or as they say in these more politically correct times: First-year students.
Plenty of people go off to school or get their first apartment with a roommate. Sometimes they become friends. Sometimes they can’t stand each other. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of indifference.
But every once in awhile, they bond. Really bond.
That freshman year, Connie (my wife) and Kathie (her roommate) were almost inseparable. The same held true for the girls in the room next door: Peg and Anne.
And they stayed close all the way through school, though they didn’t always room together.
They had different majors. They developed different circles of friends.
They fell in love.
And when graduation rolled around in the spring of 1971, they went their separate ways.
Connie and I got married. Kathie and her boyfriend Dave got married.
Peg and her boyfriend from high school, Doug, got married. Anne and her boyfriend Marshall got married.
Two of the couples ended up staying in Indiana.
One stayed in Ohio.
The fourth ended up in Connecticut.
And over the years, the girls only kept in casual contact, getting together in twos and threes, but never all four together at once.
We went to Peg and Doug’s wedding; that’s where Doug and I became instant friends. We all went to Kathie and Dave’s wedding. And later, most of us made it to Dave’s funeral after more than 25 years of marriage.
On one memorable weekend back in the 1980s, three of the four couples gathered at our house for long hours of talking about our children and our parents, the problems of raising kids and the unexpected concerns that come when Mom and Dad are rapidly aging.
But the four young girls who met that fall of 1967 as freshmen in college never got together again.
Until a few weeks ago, 40 years after their last conversation.
And the talking resumed as if 40 minutes had passed, not 40 years.
This time around, the talk was not only of children but of grandchildren. And the fretting wasn’t about our parents — nearly all of whom are now gone — but about our own prospects as we limp toward the challenges and uncertainties of life in our 60s.
The conversation began in mid-afternoon, sitting in the grass on campus about halfway between a soccer game and a field hockey match. It continued at my sister’s house over a beer. And it kept going over dinner and well into the night.
They had a lot to say to each other, these girls who are no longer girls but still think like girls and act like girls and laugh like girls.
And this conversation, now resumed, isn’t going to stop any time soon.[[In-content Ad]]