Friends

I miss having them. We have mid-life acquaintances here in South Orange so far. Given time, perhaps, we'll forge lifelong friendships. I should use the more personal pronoun, sorry. Thanks to stay-at-home motherhood, Carey has made some tighter bonds. But 2 1/2 years into this second New Jersey adventure, I don't have any men with whom I do much more than share a spot under a playground tree or have an occasional beer with at a backyard barbecue.

This isn't meant as a knock against the fine people we have met here. Our kids genuinely like their kids and at 38 that seems to be the most important thing.

I mention this because my oldest friend visited this weekend. I met Aaron Reid when we were five years old. Mrs. Jones' kindergarten class, 1977. We were classmates through high school graduation in 1990 and then managed to both attend Middlebury College. To this day I'm not sure how that happened. Laziness when it came to college applications? Or simply a desire to not say goodbye? We both ended up marrying girls we'd known since grade school, too. It all led to speaking roles at our respective weddings, time spent living near one another in Washington, D.C., and now visits every four months or so in New Hampshire or New Jersey. I figure I'm almost half done with this life, and I suspect if he's lucky enough to outlive me, he'll say a few kind words at the funeral.