Being Ourselves

I met A for coffee at the bakery in City. Our station wagons kept each other company in the parking lot. The kids were at school.

We looked at the young mothers with their young children and were glad that we were old and our children were at school. We discussed our friends and their various degrees of dissatisfaction. We considered men's dissatisfaction relative to women's (they think it's as bad; we know it's not). We agreed that we are much better off than our college classmate who just discovered that her husband is a coke addict (though I questioned the definition of addict in the case in point, and A did not sufficiently recall the details). A tried again to get me to go to our 20th college reunion and I again demurred. I said we could write a Rona Jaffe novel about our friends, and we agreed that was not a good idea. We made her a to-do list for what needs to happen before they go to California tomorrow.

She went off to send her emails and I went off to shop for groceries at Fancy Organic Store across the street (which I then stormed out of because the red peppers were $4.98 a pound, and that is just ridiculous) (red peppers in winter are ridiculous to begin with, but there's ridiculous and then there's ridiculous).

I felt like a fortysomething East Coast Big City mom. It was nice.