Every year some of us from high school go to dinner together.  We do this every summer and have been since the 80s.  I was one of the last to join in and the number has dwindled but basically it’s the same core people, and half of them were on rally.  I was not. 

In the sixth grade I had a fight with a girl who WAS rally and who still epitomizes all that can be bad about a rally girl.  She is a gossip.  She is conniving, and I don’t trust her.  She is still making it her business to run the world, and thank God for we wouldn’t be having a reunion next year, if she weren’t the same bossy bitch she always was.  Anyway, I had to sit next to her tonight.  She called me twice to see if I was coming, wanting me to call her back.  I have never called her and I would never call her.  I just realized she had been pumping me about the breakup of my friendship with the realtor (who lived across the street from me my whole childhood and who these people all knew because she was in the class behind us). 

That was Tuesday.  This is Thursday and I have recovered, mostly.  I spent the afternoon with the youngest who is back from Idaho where she lived in the woods for six weeks blazing trails and wiping with moss.  They had no showers and had to drink water from the creek to which they added iodine, I think she said.  She is here with her girlfriend, who I adore, but they are moving to San Francisco so the girlfriend can go to art school.  The mother picked out an expensive apartment without consulting my daughter, one which will take the girlfriend’s dog.  It is way more money than my daughter can afford and the mother signed a year’s lease for them.  My daughter has never committed to anyone or anything that long so this should be interesting.

I and everyone in the family are concerned that she is choosing not to go to college.  She has been working on and off and traveling.  She spent the summer in Europe and showed me the pictures today.  I am terribly proud of her adventurous spirit, which she said she got from me.  She is the only one who totally takes after her father, physically, and when I teased her today that the only thing she got from me was my bad sense of direction, she corrected me.  It suddenly occurred to me that maybe she wanted to take after me. She grew up hearing a lot of negative things about me from her dad so all these years I kind of thought she preferred taking after him. 

But, anyway, I was at my ex-mother-in-law’s, dropping my daughter off, when she suggested I see the movie they had made.  It was from 1976 when a friend of the family  followed us all around with a video camera.  She was a friend of mine, too, so I was comfortable in front of the camera.  She came to my job, my house, my husband’s job, his brother’s house; the whole family was in this movie.  Even my two springer spaniels had leading roles.  It was such a trip to see myself then and remember the rental house where we lived before we had kids.

All this history showing up in one week feels like a bit much.  I’m not sure what to make of it.  I looked really good, though, and I’m glad my kids could see the two of us together and happy.  After the movie was over his mother got up and went into her bedroom.  She came back with a beautiful picture of our firstborn in my arms that I had given her for Christmas.  I assume she still has ambivalent feelings about my leaving so I was especially grateful for the gift. 

It’s such a mix of emotion and times.  You could see in the movie that I thought I was hot shit, way more than the rest of them.  But at the table the other night I was sitting in the corner, the rally girls talking about their old uniforms and parties and the hangers-on remembering their wild times.  I went once and hated it but every time they’d remember another hilarious antic they’d say, “Prudy, you were there, right?”  And I’d say I didn’t remember.  But I did remember.  I was remembering the hellish life my mother provided and the kind of underground person I used to be.  I’m glad I saw the movie.

Today could be described as pleasant.  The weather was perfect.  My recorder group got along famously; we are really starting to enjoy each other’s company.  After we played the hostess and I walked around her yard admiring all the beautiful plants. 

She has one of the nicest gardens I’ve ever been in.  Each week something new blooms.  The plants are perrenial.  They are color coordinated so that no matter when or where you look the sizes and colors all work together.  Plus she has garden art and rod-iron fences with an arbor and gate.  Every square inch of her yard, front and back is tricked out.  She even shares a sideyard with a neighbor whose flowers were just as nice. I usesd to be quite a nut about gardening so it was fun for me to discover plants I didn’t know.

I had a good conversation with the middle daughter, who I have been struggling with lately.  The market wasn’t too bad.  I laid in the sun, grateful for the chance, as the sun will be gone soon.  The summer has gone so quickly I am even more appreciative this year.  I always get that way towards the end of August. 

I ran into a young woman I went to court reporting school with.  She is doing captioning for a high school girl who is deaf.  It was great to get caught up on everybody.  Most everyone was half my age but we got along great.  I spent four years there and made a lot of friends so it was fun to hear how everyone’s life turned out.

And finally I took a walk with my dance partner, who really isn’t.  He certainly is a wealth of information about a lot of topics I know next to nothing about.  So at the end of the day I am feeling a little lonely but happy that I had such a nice day.  Hope you did, too.

I forgot how nice it was to get home from being around a lot of strangers, get on Xanga, and have friends waiting for me.  I mean their comments were waiting.  And from my favorites.  I just tried to liken it to something comforting but I couldn’t think what.  Part of that is being out of practice and part of it is that there is very little in my life that offers the consistent (I guess I haven’t been lately), positive, forgiving, open-ended kind of socializing this offers.  At the end of the day you can check in with people in a way that you can’t have with neighbors or friends or family (for they require things).  Xanga is the perfect way to say goodnight to the day.

I’m still wearing my name-tag from the party I went to.  My friend, who I teach bellydance to on Tues nights, had a block party.  She and her husband and the neighbors across the street have a band.  They’re pretty good and over the years I have gone to enough parties that I know lots of their neighbors.  But tonight I met someone I really liked.  He was acting single and we really hit it off but I found out later he was married.  Figures.  By the time you’re my age you have a very distinct type of guy who might be a match.  And my radar’s good so when it goes off I know I’ve found — Maybe not one in a million but you get the idea.

This afternoon I went to another party and this was very special to me.  My support group, back in 2001, was comprised of a very powerful group of women.  Every Tues at 10:00 we’d hang out for a couple hours, do a little meditation, some sharing and every once in a while have a speaker.  It was supervised by a cancer nurse and a cancer counselor (shrink).  The nurse and a few of us would get together socially but I lost track of them because my ISP suddenly got fussy and considered their email to be spam.  Two years went by before I ran into one of the women and we got it all cleared up.  The group thought I hadn’t wanted to socialize with them anymore and I thought they weren’t inviting me for some reason.  One of the women I hadn’t been fond of was there.  Her husband had been the head of the hospital, and my doctor for a brief time before he retired.  She came up to me today and said how much she enjoyed my column.  I thanked her but said I’d quit doing it.  On the way home, I realized her husband had probably read it, too.  Because how else could she have gotten it?  It was only for staff. 

When his wife got breast cancer all of a sudden all this money became available and the hospital’s focus really changed in terms of how receptive they were to Eastern medicine. I don’t think it was any coincidence that this man’s son had just graduated from a naturopathic college.  I only know this because the son observed my procedure when his dad aspirated the cyst on my thyroid.  These people came into my life, one at a time, in sort of an odd way.  After the procedure, the doctor invited me back into his office — I wondered at the time why he had such huge, plush quarters on a floor that was administrative.  He asked me all sorts of questions about my experiences at the hospital.  He’d read my file and could see I’d spent a fair amount of time there over the years .  Later, I saw his son for an unrelated issue, and then  I met the senior doctor’s wife in my support group.  I’d remembered her from her picture.  It had been in the plush office and the reason it was so memorable was because she was standing next to her plane and she was a knockout.

The reason I laid all that out was that when I found out, after my thyroid incident, how much power the doctor had at the hospital, I almost presented him with a proposal.  I thought it was pointless but I was seeing a medical intuitive and he encouraged me to write something up, addressing the way the hospital was dealing with breast cancer.  I thought it was crazy.  I told him the hospital would never go for it.  The funny thing is the hospital did go for it, five years later, and it was because of this woman’s husband.  And, after today, I’m thinking it was because of her.  I kind of liked her today.

Don’t you find, when it’s been a long time in between posts, that you feel like you should have big news?  It’s like calling up a friend you haven’t talked to in ages and trying to think where to start when they ask what you’ve been up to.  Lots of times I look back over the months and feel productive but not this time. 

Actually, that’s not true.  I lost 12 pounds and gained a new dance partner.  That should read the other way around.  Unfortunately, I am not attracted to him but he is kind and intelligent and he likes to walk my dog with me so we do that along with the dancing. 

My Spanish threesome is now a twosome.  Jerry dropped out, but Kay and I have plugged along without him. We will join a new class in the fall, hopefully learning enough this summer to fit in with the more advanced class.

I successfully navigated a weekend with the married man and his friends, without doing anything I’m ashamed of.  We all had a wonderful time and are already looking forward to next year.  My heart aches, though, at the thought of all those months of distance. 

My daughters and I have been extremely close this summer.  I’m not sure why and it hasn’t all been rosy but they each have been calling much more often and the two who live here I see probably once a week.

I’m still playing music every Monday morning and have become much more comfortable with them.  My music class Wed night will resume in the fall but I haven’t decided whether I’ll take it again.

My stock buddy dumped me once he started sleeping with his girlfriend.  Rather, he said I shouldn’t come to dinner anymore but that we could still talk on the phone.  I told him I didn’t think he should be calling me if his girlfriend didn’t know about it.  Funny how I can talk to a married man but tell him he should fess up to this woman.  Anyway, he finally told her and now we are talking again.  Good thing since I don’t know what the hell to do about the market.  I liquidated my IRA Friday and will stay in cash until I can figure out what’s going on.  My other acct, where most of the money is, I’m keeping everything as the capitol gain would be too much if I sold.  It’s such old stock.  So, that consumes most of my time, listening to CNBC, trying to figure out why the tape is up when I know in my gut that things are really bad.  I believe someone is artificially juicing the market.  Believe me, that’s not something I’ve heard anywhere.  I don’t even know who or how but something’s not right about a day like today.

I had a dinner party for the sister who was at loose ends a while back [read living in a woman's shelter].  She’s moving to Berlin.  You should have seen her.  She looked fantastic; very chic.  She’s been living in an apartment, working at a great job, using all her skills with web design and foreign language.  She wants to get her masters in Russian.  I was walking past my mother, taking plates into the dining room, when she (mother) announced, “incidentally, I love all of you.” 

You can probably tell I haven’t been writing, unless you count the many notes I jot down each day about what the analysts are saying.  It’s all a bunch of words I’ve never heard before so I read it to Sam and he tries to make sense of it.  Between the two of us we’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s going on.  We just don’t know what to do about it.