Four Women

Attended a birthday party today. The honored one was turning fifty. She was part of a group of girls that had gone to school together, partied together as young women, and now that they are turning the half century mark, still remain close. When I was younger and single, for one wild year, I was on the fringe of their "group". They took me along on a few of their adventures, even christened me "Alice" so as to symbolically make me "one of the girls". Outside of a fair amount of drinking and herbalism, it was pretty much good clean fun. I had even taken the birthday girl on a date once, but nothing "happened". We all got along, it was good to be in a low-key, non-sexual relationship with all of them. Later, as we were "married off", those days were put behind us.

At the party today four of those "gal-pals" were reunited. They are still close; I had a sense that this party, or rather this reality, was due to and sustained by that friendship. The guys that were involved with them (the rock band we were all in), still see each other once in a while, but in sort of a parallel universe- some of the guys ended up marrying some of those girls. The ones that had relationships but broke up with the girls tended to drift apart from the guys as well. At the party, among the women, there was a bit of blouse-flapping going on, but at fifty that's only to be expected. They all looked great. I was really struck by how socialized we had become. The raw, rough punks, the beastie boys that we once were, had been tamed by these beauties. Love works its wondrous charm in mysterious ways.