Old friends…Now friends…

I spent a weekend in Lonavala with two of my closest college friends and their kids. Although we have stayed in touch, being in the vacation home for a couple of days, cooking together, wandering about, taking over a kids’ park (move over kids, the old ladies need the slides and swings!) and chatting non-stop over endless cups of tea and coffee, puran polis and chiwda, for a couple of days was a treat. 

It’s funny how easily you slip back into a carefree time when you’re with old friends. We talked about boys(!!), old crushes, and also husbands and marriage. We goofed around, teased each other relentlessly, talked non-stop, and were at our silliest best. 

Our kids stared at us wondering who these women were, disapproving of our behavior at times and silently wondering what had become of their mothers. My daughter had never witnessed anyone teasing me such, had never heard such stories (ahem…those may come back to haunt me). “You guys are silly,” she chided, part disapproval, part confusion. It was a weekend I will always remember.  

True we continue to make wonderful meaningful friendships all our lives. And I am definitely fortunate to always have terrific people around me. But being with college friends is always different. For it is a beautiful reminder of youth and carefree days and lack of responsibilities; or perhaps a different approach to responsibility – a time when everything seemed easy and anything seemed possible. A time when we were all stars and felt like real stars (ahem…true “greatness” aside).

This trip to India has been about people and reconnection with family and friends for both my husband and I. We met with his college friends and shared the funniest, strangest and silliest of stories. We laughed till our sides hurt. We looked at old pictures and laughed at ourselves. 

I had a reunion with school friends and we reconnected within minutes even if some of us met after decades. We walked through our beautiful school campus. We giggled, we reminisced, we shared, we empathized. We talked about those who life had not treated well; those who husbands had not treated well. I was touched by how much we seemed to care about each other and how authentic the concern was. For after all, we remembered each other as school girls in pigtails. To imagine the same scrawny school girls in red ribbons having to battle life’s challenges seemed unjust. Some of us have kids the very age as we remembered ourselves; and it seemed all the more difficult. 

And I know I have more treats in store. For this week I meet my dance class friends, friends I used to go on Himalayan hikes with… and there are so many fond memories there. We meet with more of my husband’s college friends and there is plenty of laughter in store there and then of course my journalism gang of crazies… I can hardly wait.

I wonder why it is so special to meet old friends. Is it because it takes us back to a life we no longer live, and wish we did (no matter how unrealistic that sounds)? A time that seems easy, carefree and fun? A heady, dizzy time when we lived only in the moment?

When we meet old friends, are we able to completely put aside our current grown-up life with its humdrum and responsibilities?

Every friendships we make in later years, no matter how rich and meaningful, will always be one made in a more “grown-up” period of our lives – a time of responsibility, a time of maturity, a more serious time. For who has the time to wander around town aimlessly anymore, or spend hours at a chai tapri (stand) philosophizing over tiny cups of overly brewed, overly sweet chai?

Perhaps that wandering about aimlessly forms the base of such sound friendships. And that wandering about aimlessly can never happen again. Perhaps old friendships have a near dream-like quality – beautiful, unreal, wispy and evanescing.  

And as much as I treasure the old friendships from a time gone by, I treasure just as much my new friendships - those made in the grown-up years. True, I may never wander about aimlessly for hours with any of my “now friends”. True they will never be as carefree, as silly, as reminiscent of youth.  

The “now friendships” are real, more matter-of-fact, more surrounded by schedules, and work, and chauffeuring-the-kids-to-activities. The "now friends" may know more about your daily struggles, see you as you now are. They have as much grey in them as our hair, they are more bound by limitations, they belong to those who are less giggly, less silly, and more responsible.They are who we now are.

But they are both just as real and as valuable. And I am grateful for being able to hold on to the old that make me feel the way I have felt in recent days; and I am grateful for the new, those that belong to my every day…