Dinner with friends I don’t see enough – one of them a friend I first met 37 years ago – someone I knew when I was impressionable and young (you were never impressionable…and some days it feels like you were never young….) She was a mentor to me, as well as a friend, and I don’t think she even knows it. A crucial three years older when we met – me, a high school kid, her, a worldly university student. We had summer jobs together at a historic site (Best. Job. Ever. Paid to dress up and play pretend. That place made me who I am. It formed me.)
Dinner was al fresco and we sat on her patio and talked, ate grilled chicken and corn and potatoes picked an hour before from her garden. It was the supper I’d waited all summer to have and it was perfect. We caught up, I saw the plans to the new house they’re building. We talked about retirement. Neither of us is ready to stop working, but maybe ready for something less…demanding.
(I remember when we were both university students and we’d work all day, go drinking and dancing all night, have a hangover breakfast and report for work at the historic site, primed and ready to go the next morning…)
Seriously, was I ever that young?
Dessert and tea and more conversation, trying to solve the world’s problems – finally I tear myself away and drive to pick up Gavin from my friend Betty who had agreed to dog sit for the evening. (Everyone should have such wonderful friends. I hope he was well behaved, he better not have gotten into anything.)
He’s asleep on the couch like an angel when I arrive but he quickly grabs a toy to come and greet me with big wags of his spectacular tail. Betty says he was a perfect gentleman and I rub his ears and tell him what a good boy is.
Gavin and I hit the road for home.
It’s a twenty five minute drive from town to the tiny cottage I’m renting. Past the main corner (I remember learning to drive a standard transmission on this hill, I thought I was going to roll all the way back down into the bay,) down the hill and then a sharp right onto the road that follows the curves of the harbour.
We’re in no hurry. Gavin settles into the passenger seat, curls up and does a snoozle, exhausted from an evening of guarding Betty’s house.
The lights of town fall away and it’s full dark now, dark as the inside of a cow, and I follow the winding road, my bright lights painting the way for us to go.
It’s halfway home in the low, straightaway that I spot it – the Big Dipper is over my left shoulder, shining like a sort of beacon in the night. It’s pacing me, so each time I peek away from the road to look for it, it’s there, spilling out its goodness into the night sky. I remember that two of its stars point towards Polaris and sure enough, I’m heading due north.
(Does anyone really know where they’re going?)
It makes me think of car rides when I was a kid, safe and warm in the back seat, lying on my back watching the moon follow us home, the car swooping along the road, banking and braking, the metronome of the turn indicator clicking, clicking, clicking.
Judy Collins comes up on my playlist and it is bittersweet.
Across the evening sky,
All the birds are leaving
But how can they know
It’s time for them to go?…
I drive slower, letting my lights illuminate the tunnels of sleeping trees and I roll down the windows. The smell of cooling trees and musky earth fills the air. Gavin lifts his head and samples the breeze.
Before the winter fire,
I’ll still be dreaming
I have no thought of time
For who knows where the time goes?
I drive on and watch the Big Dipper pour out its secret treasure.
We pull in, kill the lights. The nearby cottages are silent silhouettes.
Gavin and I make our way through the dark, down to the tiny cottage on the shore and I can hear the waves as we approach.
I text Mom: Home safe.
The stars shine on like beacons.
Who knows where the time goes?
P.
P.S. Coming later this week – an excerpt from The Date Square Dharma…