The Muddled Middle

I've been chatting with an old friend lately, catching up on 40 years as if it were just a brief hiatus. Lots of stuff has happened to each of us during that "middle" chapter, a big chunk of life lived completely oblivious to what the other was doing. 

It's kind of like falling asleep during a movie. They say the devil is in the details for some things, but for me, in a dark theatre, the details are the devil; the middle is when I doze. I can fill in the minutiae on my own, as long as I know how it all begins and how it ends.  

So, here we are. Not the end, I hope, but as we approach 60, far closer than we were when. When. When we thought we knew who we were and where we'd be going and nobody clued us in that we really had no idea. Each of us, in the mind of the other, is still forever young. Grainy Facebook pictures don't change that. 

Life has thrown my old friend some curves lately, curves that make my own struggles seem, well, like a hill of beans. Years ago, I had a good friend who was dying. Not dying in the sense that we are all dying with each tick of the clock, but in the real way that most of us cannot fathom, when you know your days are seriously numbered. She used to call me to entertain her with stories of my petty problems, though she never so much as insinuated they were petty. She liked when I took her out of her head, even for a moment, to let her forget about all that she was destined to miss. I wish, all these years later, I could fill her in on the details, on the stuff that seems as inconsequential as the middle of a movie while it's happening, the stuff that somehow led me from there to here. It would be nice to pick up where we left off. 

It's been easy, somehow, to pick up with my old friend where we left off, despite the 40 year gap. He thinks I'm taking him out of his head, for a moment here and there, but the truth is he's doing the same for me. There's something about the ones who knew you before you were fully formed, especially when you have the sense, all of sudden, that you are. If I am, indeed, fully formed, it seems just a little less frightening when I talk to somebody who knew me, or at least thought he did, when.