Ladies' Night Out

I had dinner last night with two ladies -- one, a decade or so younger than I but a relatively old friend, the other almost a decade older than I, a new acquaintance.

The three of us lead different lives with considerable overlap. The ages of our kids, the stages of our lives, our fluctuating levels of contentment and discontent and, for the most part, some ill-defined place in between. My younger friend and I had taken the traditional route. We had postponed our "swingin' adult singlehood," had raised kids and let our marriages fail first. Our new acquaintance did things in reverse, which leaves her with a startlingly rose colored memory of carefree dating days that neither of the other of us can quite understand.

Three women, shaped by our own unique choices -- good and bad -- and a lifetime of stuff that was beyond our control. Two of us ordered stick to your ribs, man-sized meals, the third ordered boiled chicken. She is determined to be thin at her daughters' college graduations.

Thin is overrated, I told her, shoveling in another hunk of bread slathered with butter.

You say that because you're thin, she responded, picking at some crumbs.

Of course, like any red-blooded woman, I don't consider myself thin, but that's beside the point. We agreed that thin may not be a bad thing, but it certainly doesn't guarantee happiness. Certainly not the way a huge plate of chicken Parmesan does. Or personal fulfillment or true love, I'd imagine, though I can only speak of what I know.

We found ourselves to be on the same page on lots of things. Trump -- tragic. Fox News -- unwatchable. My new acquaintance was a bit taken aback when she discovered that MSNBC was my perennial background noise -- she's a CNN addict -- but she was okay with it, because they're on her side. When did we all take sides? We had talked, earlier, about how we yearn for the days of George Bush. He was a dope, but a relatively harmless dope. I hated the way he pronounced "nuclear" ("nucular") but at least he wasn't treating the button as if it were attached to a pinball machine.

We have not only taken sides, but we have even begun to isolate ourselves within our own camps. We are, all three of us, unintentionally nocturnal. We cozy up with our pets to binge watch whatever we choose, and we find ourselves resenting intrusions by actual people during the day. We all made a great show of tucking our phones away when we sat down to dinner, but the sense of relief was palpable when we were able to retrieve them -- on the pretense of adding our new acquaintance to our virtual spheres. The phones stayed on the table, after that. Phew.

I supported my new friend's quest for thinness, mostly because she rejected my offer to share my chicken Parmesan. We scurried off to our respective cocoons, with promises to make this a regular "thing." It was lots of fun, but I don't know that any of us is capable of that kind of commitment.