Lie-la-Lie

It is impromptu only in the sense that I find myself surprised to be there.

The text goes out some time on Thursday afternoon. 3:00 tomorrow. My house. I am notoriously remiss about entering contact information, but I just ask for the address and show up. It doesn't really matter whose house it is. As long as it's not mine.

It's an unlikely and motley (in a good way, kind of like a mosaic) assortment of people, the loosely organized but alarmingly cohesive group that populates my neighborhood Starbucks at dawn. The women are outnumbered, but I like to think we add a certain je ne satis quoi to the group. Really, I have no idea what it is that anyone adds, although this week I supplied the cucumbers.

It is hardly surprising that the drinks at three in the afternoon are always the same (and, yes, they involve cucumbers). Every day, while most people are still asleep, we are trickling in to our morning watering hole, where the baristas all know us by name and, if they see us coming, have our "usual" waiting for us on the counter. It is an impromptu daily gathering that requires no invitation, but we all do our best to show up, and we respect a more or less unspoken code of assigned seating. (Unspoken, that is, until somebody messes with it.)

We range in age from mid-forties to mid-seventies, but if you toss out the lowest and the highest, I find myself at the young end, which is strangely reassuring. A founder and key member recently moved out of state. Everybody pretends not to notice, but it's weird not having him here. We think he misses us, even though he is happily surrounded by children and grandchildren. We think we are that entertaining.

Had someone been a fly on the patio railing yesterday afternoon, the idea of us being entertaining would have, in and of itself, been entertaining. We sat, barely noticing the occasional horizontal drizzle blowing through, drinking our exotic gin and tonic and juniper berry and bay leaf and cucumber drinks -- it's all about the brands and the proportions, and if I reveal that, they'll have to kill me -- listening to Simon and Garfunkel and other great music from the great old days that we all remember in our own special ways, depending on where we fall on the baby boom spectrum.

Lie-la-lie. We all lost ourselves for a few moments in The Boxer. Is there anybody over forty who doesn't know all the lyrics? Lie-la-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie. Paul Simon claims it was just a space filler, only temporary until he could figure out what words to say. Forty-five years later, the "real" words still haven't come, but the space filler, well, to borrow a phrase, "still remains." Lie-la-lie. Longevity, on borrowed time. The song just wouldn't be the same without the dog-eared refrain.

As I gathered up my cucumbers for the trek over to what was only my second impromptu Friday afternoon gathering, a friend texted to tell me she was in my neighborhood and wanted me to meet my new boyfriend. I was excited. "You got a new puppy?" was my reply. When you spend so much time just filling up space and reveling in the rose colored glory days of your youth, your mind forgets that, though happiness is indeed a warm puppy, there is always space for more. Happiness, that is. There was no new puppy. I assured the male human I would have looked more presentable but I had expected him to be a dog.

I could claim that my own puppy and my motley band of Starbucks friends and my pair of cucumbers for the secret drink whose name I can't remember are just space fillers, that I am waiting for something else to come along. That I am really not as settled into the booth side of the first table near the couch for the long haul. I'd be lying, though. Lie-la-lie.