Reunited and it feels so good.
She went to high school in Egypt and I in my mother’s basement.  She rendezvoused with poets and lawyers while I passed time with skate punks and bleached out blondes with multiple piercings.  She listened to things like Phillip Glass and I loved Al B. Sure.  She swathed her neck in patterned scarves and covered her eyes in horn-rimmed glasses.  I wore a tattered baseball cap and ripped shorts.  We sized each other up in about four seconds and liked what we saw.
She was my first college roommate.  After twenty years we met on face book and then we got together in person. 
I had a moment the day she was to arrive.  What did my life look like after a good fifteen years?  Twenty years into my adult life I knew I’d never be fabulously wealthy or well traveled.  I wasn’t going to be a well-dressed dynamo or some Ceo.  I was, simply put: a housewife baking cookies for the past fifteen years.  Ok so I never baked a cookie from scratch in my entire life but I’ve gotten pretty good with those separate and bake cookie dealies.  And how did I look?  Well I’m thin.  There’s that.  Unfortunately we aren’t always talking thin in a glamorous sort of way but perhaps more thin in a harried, pulled at both ends, used to be a junkie sort of way.  Perhaps my outfits might have changed a mite over the past fifteen years but I’m thinking I’m wearing the same hat as when I met her twenty years ago.  Should the thrift store and my sister in law’s cast offs be my favorite shopping venue at this point in my life?  All these questions left me feeling like Charlie Brown with the football pulled out…ARGHHH!
And then there’s my job.  Sure I’m a writer but lets face it mostly I’m a waiter.  Linguistically they are close; only a letter separates them but in reality well one’s humping food to nasty strangers and the other is tapping away at a type writer.  I mean, I’m still in uniform, which sometimes feels like a hop skip, and a french fry away from my job at McDonald’s drive thru.  And why do I still cherish that job and remember it as one of the most productive times in my life?  Getting 273 people through drive through in one hour is impressive…still.
Does anyone care that I’ve changed over 6,000 diapers, packed over 1,290 healthy lunches and can do a pretty mean science project?  And if Mrs. D is reading this, I had nothing to do with that whole tooth decay display.  It was all my 3rd grader…all him.
And how does all this compare to traveling all over the world, residing in Italy and working as a wine consultant?  I’m not sure because I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a wine consultant it sounds chic beyond belief.  Not that I know what chic is.
When Jena pulled up I was in the front yard making sure we looked the picture of domestic bliss which wasn’t hard considering I’d bribed my teenager and my toddler would take to a tree. 
Oh yes, I thought as Donovan enveloped her in a big hug looking good looking good.
“Oh and here comes my husband” I said airily as he walked out looking gratifyingly hunky in his fireman’s uniform.
Looking real good.
We got in the car and that was the end of my charade.  I wasn’t fooling no one.  She knows me like the back of her hand and as we hit the nearest wine bar; I realized that success has many faces because I wouldn’t hit the nearest wine bar if it were the last watering hole on earth.  I’m not even sure why they would dedicate all that bar space to something you swish around in goblet and sip till your teeth turn red.  When she ordered butternut squash soup I didn’t know what color it would come in because the only soup I make at home is a two-worded soup that rhymes with poodles of doodles.
Twenty years later we sized each other up.  We liked what we saw.  All things considered we wouldn’t trade our lives for nothing.  Fact is I have great family and it’s what I do best even if I still haven’t learned the fine art of cookie baking.  Maybe by our next reunion… but then again maybe not.
P.S.
Someone’s getting married this August and it isn’t me- I guess I’ll be willing to share my cookie recipe if she’s willing to share her recipe for butternut squash soup on second thought she can have that cookie recipe I’m not into orange soup.  Congratulations Jena!  Domesticity never had such a chic and exciting new member!