Eight Miles Wide

I got a message a couple of days ago from my friend Debbie: “I’m going to be in Dallas tomorrow. What are the chances of our getting together?”

“Duh. 100% of course,” I wrote back. I cleared my calendar. I haven’t seen Debbie since tenth grade, but some things never change and friendship is one of them. I sent a note to Chris, “My friend Debbie is spending the night.”

“Who??”

“My best friend from middle school, Debbie. You know, I’ve told you about her, from that swank private school I went to. You’ll like her. She’s really beautiful.”

Chris wrote, “Who?? I can’t keep track of all of your friends. What’s she like? What’s her story?”

“Well, she’s awesome, of course. She’s a nurse in Florida, I think she works with old people. She’s hilarious. She just got married, in Connecticut, to a woman who’s a neuropsych professor, I think.”

“Are any of your friends straight?”

I did a quick tally from facebook. 30/500 that I know of, or fewer than 10% of my friends are gay and out of the closet. “Yeah, most of them.”

Chris came home early(ish) from work, another of our friends drove down from Plano, and we all hung out rehashing old memories until way too late. Mean people are still mean, my friend reported from our 25th high school reunion ( I skipped it), and, surprisingly, none of those mean people, to her at least, seemed happy. Sometimes, smug is good. And our school really was that crazy — we see that now in hindsight.

This morning, my friend and I tooled around Dallas in her little BMW Z4, with the top down. In a scene straight out of Glee, she was blasting songs from The Book of Mormon, when she exclaimed, “OMG you HAVE to hear this song,” poked her iphone a couple of times, and put on this little ditty:

All I wanted was to go back in time and tell my twelve-year-old self that in 30 years, Debbie and I would be driving down down Lover’s Lane in Dallas, Texas in her two-seater convertible, still singing along to songs on the radio. Somewhere, somehow, I think I got the message.