Tonight should be fun -- one of my oldest friends is in town for a family thing
and we get to go meet her for dinner. Apparently, her great-aunt is turning 90, or
something like that. It's a funny thing; I've known S since third grade, and yet
I've never met her dad, siblings (including the well known
href="http://www.sarasteele.com/">artist, whose work -- artistic and activist
-- I really like despite the rather ugly web page), or any of the relatives she's
meeting here. She knows my parents, thinks my brother is cute (in her mind, he's
still about 3 years old) and even went with me to visit my uncle, when we were 13
years old. I know her mom and have met her ex-stepfather and ex-stepsister. Not to
mention her ex-husband.
This is because S was the first person I'd
ever met who came from what they used to call a 'broken home'. There was only one
other girl I knew in grade school whose mother worked full time, and her father
was dead (Vietnam, I presume). Back then, in the mid-70s, most kids I knew had a
father who worked and a mother who stayed home and took care of the kids. That all
changed amazingly fast -- there were lots of people with divorced parents by the
time I got to junior high school, and of course now I don't think there are any
kids who don't know plenty of moms who work, dads who watch kids single parents,
and so on. (Except maybe in some of the local heavily-Mormon neighborhoods.) It's
always sad, of course, when marriages don't work, and it's true that more of the
people I know whose parents are divorced are working on a second or third marriage
themselves. (Though this is more true of my generation. My dad's parents divorced,
as did my father-in-law's, and they've both stayed married.)
In a
way, though, it's probably a good thing in some ways for the kids to have more
diverse models of happy families. At least they know they have
options.
Anyway, it will be good to see S. We've always had an on-
again, off-again sort of friendship, not because we fought, but because of lack of
proximity. We went to school together for 3rd and 4th grade, then her mom
remarried and moved away. We kept in sporadic touch, and ended up getting bussed
to the same school on the same day as part of the gifted program in 7th grade.
Then we got funneled into the same high school and had classes together. We ended
up at the same college, 2 of the 3 people from our class who went there, but had
interests different enough that we didn't see each other too often. I went off to
Houston and she went off to med school, but it's been at least a couple of years
since I saw her last. Maybe I'll finally get to meet that artist sister.