Sunday, May 04, 2014

Life is good, wild and sweet, let the music play on.

It's a familiar feeling at this point.  The Sunday morning exhaustion mixed with a sense of longing and wistfulness, plus a hair of a lingering alcohol headache.  Trying mentally to race through and catologue snippets of conversations and laughter and songs and enveloping embraces from the previous two days, so as to not lose them, or the feeling they evoke.  Part of me can't stop smiling, the other part is on the verge of tears.

My India classmates gathered together in DC this past weekend for a mini-reunion.  About 45 of us gathered Friday and Saturday nights at restaurants downtown, and yesterday afternoon for a backyard lunch, to catch up and reminisce and try to recapture the magic that we were so lucky to experience in the late 80s at the American School in New Delhi, India.  We've been looking forward to it for months, and then it was a couple of weeks and then it was in a few days and then it was upon us and now it's over much too fast.

One of my friends remarked last week that when he told people he was heading to a high school reunion, people were like, "ooooh, great," with a note of skepticism.  And we know how unique our experience was - it's hard to explain that when we are all together again, we feel like we're home.  There's this happy love buzz that seeps into our nerves and our bones.  Yesterday morning, notwithstanding having gotten maybe 3 hours of sleep, I woke up way early because I felt like I was vibrating like a tuning fork.

We couldn't stop hugging each other.  Our cheeks hurt from smiling and our heads hurt from laughing.

My knees hurt from getting so into an air guitar performance of Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" that I literally dropped to my knees on the hard floor of the restaurant to hit the high notes at the end.

We took over an Indian restaurant, ate yummy food and drank Indian beer, and talked and laughed and danced until 3 in the morning.  As before, I see my friends the way they were when we together 30 years ago -- there is no gray hair, no middle-aged spread, no wrinkles.  It's a weekend of magical thinking. They are still young and beautiful to me.  The same crushes on the same boys resurface (and the fact that an astounding number of us are going through divorces and separations exacerbate it). The crazy memories from trips to Goa and bonfire parties in the woods and skipping school to go hang out in Agra feel impossibly fresh.

As my dear friend Lisa described a few days ago, back in Delhi we used to do this (admittedly incredibly corny) thing at parties when Lionel Ritchie's All Night Long would play, and we would get in a circle with our arms around each other and sway back and forth and dance together.  When the song came on last night, it was late - there were about 15 or 16 of us still at the restaurant, and we made a circle and put our arms around each other and started to dance.  I was looking around at everyone smiling and laughing, and thinking about how much I love these people and how much I love the feeling I have when I'm with them.  It was such an intensely wonderful, perfect moment.  And I burst into tears.

And then a few other people burst into tears.

Even the ones who were comforting me knew I was OK.  Everything was OK. I wasn't sad.  I was so happy that it was overwhelming.  I never wanted the feeling to end.

I'm sitting in Washington National Airport right now, waiting to board a flight to Orlando, where I'll be at a legal conference for the next few days.  And no, I'm not crying as I write this.  I have dust in my eyes. Really.

I wish it all wasn't over so quickly.  I wish we all lived closer together.  I wish we all had another day together.  I wish we had time to dance to another song.

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous8:04 PM

    Thanku wendy! Loved reading this! Pitch perfect. Hugs cecilia

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous7:39 AM

    Ever thought about writing a book? Feel I was right there with you guys. Mirko

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thank you, Mirko! It's funny, a number of people over the years have told me I should write a book, but I've never been (or thought of myself) as a long-form writer with a narrative that plays out over a couple hundred pages. I feel like my strength is in essays. Though I guess I could try to publish a book of essays! :)

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