Search This Blog

Monday 14 March 2011

On Growing Oldish without Regret

When Dave and I first started living together, we found a big house in a great neighbourhood and moved our kids and cats.  The kids' school was close enough for them to walk to and we soon had a firm foothold in the community.  We were both working and unbelievably, found that our neighbours whose kids were of an age with ours, would take our kids for lunch and afterschool care.

Chris and Sarah were ecstatic.  Dave and Lorna were ecstatic.  Not only were our neighbours, Tom and Kazuko, lovely people, she was a dietitian and he a person with enough patience to teach the kids how to use chopsticks.  Our kids eventually moved on to community centre afterschool programs, but we continued to be neighbours with the Tsais for a few years.  We moved and moved and moved, they moved to a bigger, modern house with lots of opportunity for gardening and we continued to see them, sometimes by plan and sometimes by serendipity.

Fast forward to last night, when we had dinner again with them, this time at our place. 

We sat around, eating homemade sushi (not mine) and getting updated on the various kids and their kids, and marvelling at how little changed we felt from our young selves in spite of weddings and grandchildren and retirement.

We tried, but in vain I think, to convince them that they really needed to move into our building, and when they left, Dave and I felt an irresistible longing for 70s music and both noticed that we were moving in ways that suggested we were flicking our hair off our shoulders, and swaggering around in our flared-leg jeans.

4 comments:

  1. I think 70s music is much too modern. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's hilarious! And sweet.
    Yeah. There's no friend like an old friend.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm glad you had a great dinner. It's so nice that you keep in touch - even if years pass by in between. I bet it was like you didn't skip a beat.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Some of my best friends today are those same people I raised kids with. Most of us are now so decrepit compared to what we one were, that I don't think too much about the hair--but disco! And Credence Clearwater and Simon and Garfunkel, and the Beatles. Oh, oh, I'm swishing my hair back and forth and I can see Ray in his kick-ass green corduroy leisure suit.

    ReplyDelete