Wee-Morning Musings...

We met at our old haunt. A chain Italian restaurant with free bread and oil for dipping - perfect for cheap dates in college. Drink water, split a pizza - and keep the bread comin'.

Back then, we would drive together, piled in a heap of a car, pressed against windows, rubbing jacket sleeves, and buzzing about how many of the warm rolls we could stomach in a sitting.

Dinner tonight was different. It was arranged via cell phones and emails. Each couple arrived in their own car, from various locations - some from an hour's drive away. We gathered at a long rustic table, two baskets of rolls - to say goodbye to a friend leaving for the West Coast.

He rode around Europe with me - on that trainride to Poland. Over the length of our journey, he mused about various poems and theater productions - a traveling theater company he hoped to start - scripts he planned to write.

We spent 150 hours, unbroken, together. He did the math when our travels ended, in the living room of a Romanian family's modest house. 150 hours of talking and silence. Of Polish madmen hucking Coke bottles from train windows and sleeping on stinky house boats. 150 hours of genuine, pure, unadulterated, friendship. When we finally parted ways, we knew each other deeply. Beyond words.

And even I couldn't have predicted this. My real life Peter Pan is engaged and moving to the opposite coast - to start an MBA program, of all things.

Another college friend got married this past weekend in Minnesota. She and I met in the haphazard flurry of Freshman year - the rush to accumulate friends - to not go to dinner alone. One of my first true friends from that life, one of my bridesmaids - and we missed her wedding because of a stack of bills - and that breakdown a few weeks ago (best estimate thus far? $4,000. I hate cars.)

I've been mulling over the changes lately. How much we've grown. Changed. Moved. Georgia. Pennsylvania. California. Minnesota. The recent engagements. The upcoming babies. The weddings. The cross-country moves. The dispersing of my circle of friends as we spread throughout the country and sink deeper into the thick of our busy lives. No time for phone calls. Hardly anytime for emails anymore. No time to pile in a car and split pizza's. We're stretching to the point of fingertips on keyboards.

But, sitting tonight with a handful of us that remain local, time seemed to slow to a distant chug - hardly pulling us any further apart than we were five years ago. My Peter Pan sat across from me, his arm curved behind the chair of his fiancee, a wide smile on his face. He's neatly groomed - hair clean, cheeks shaved, shirt tucked. A polished and buffed model of the unkempt boy who travelled 150 hours with me. But his smile's the same. As is the sparkle behind his eyes. MBA? Maybe. But Peter Pan still lives.

And that gives me hope for myself. That somewhere, behind my tired eyes and beneath the rough skin on my knuckles (from a million or so scrubbings a day - post diapers, post feedings, etc,) despite layers of bland black shirts and straight-from-the-discount-rack jeans - somewhere beneath it all (the sleepy-mommy, the bedgraggled wife), there's still a glimmer of the girl with a sticker beside her eye, scuffed Doc Martin's, and a pair of patched pants - with a ticket to somewhere in her back pocket.