Don't Wait Too Long To Come Home, My How the Years and Our Youth Passed On*

The wind is whipping off the Lake today like it's November and not the end of September. We haven't even closed our pool yet, but today it feels Autumn, hardly here, is giving way to Winter. Across the street from my office, in the coffee shop, several Coast Guard guys** are still in their summer short-sleeved uniforms - shivering and hunched over coffee.

I am wrapped in melancholy and blanketed in nostalgia.

I spent Saturday with some of my favorite people from college.

It was Homecoming, and it seems, sometimes, you can go home again.

Saturday afternoon I sat on the front porch of my theater professor's house, with most of the people who made up my world in those days. (I did a lot of theater. We were always in rehearsal, always running lines, or constructing a set, or taking one down.) We ate chili and garlic bread and drank and laughed. We laughed that deep down belly laughter that shakes your whole body. It was wonderful to laugh like that.

Then we tail-gated outside the football stadium (something I didn't actually do when I was IN college) and went for Mexican food, and to our favorite bar...where they actually RAN OUT OF GLASSES because there were so many people had come in for Homecoming.


There was a perfection to the whole day, marred only by the absence of Husband, who stayed home with Gabe and Lana so that I could walk down memory lane with some of my favorite people.

Some of my friendships, born in college, have grown and changed and those people (you know who you are) are even more important to me today than fifteen years ago. But some of my other friends from college - some of the ones I had a chance to see on Saturday, are people I hadn't seen in years. And it's likely I will not see them again for a long time. But for a few hours, it felt like no time had passed at all. It was magical and it meant more to me than I can adequately express.

LM

* The Gaslight Anthem, Miles Davis and The Cool
** What is the proper term for a person in the Coast Guard? A Sailor? A Lakeman? I should know, I see them almost every day, but I don't know what they are called.