sat on the living room couch like bookends

I said earlier that I just don’t often get to have great conversations with people I know in “real life” because either the people I encounter don’t share too many of my interests or else we just don’t have time to have those long talks often. There’s one other factor I didn’t mention: some people just take a long time to unfold. I don’t think I’m one of them; my light is not buried under a bushel and I suspect most people don’t need to talk to me for very long to figure out what’s here, for good or ill. I’ve met a number of people who seem all right on the surface, but the better you get to know them the more you don’t want to. The opposite, though, is one of the pleasures in life: the ones you meet and like, but only gradually come to realize just how much you like them. My friend Egret is one of those.

I first got to know her 7 or 8 years ago, when we rowed together in a (very bad) eight at the Head of the Charles. At the time, she was divorced and had a couple of kids in high school. We got to know each other a lot better in Boston and then when she took up with T2, Rudder’s doubles partner at the time. She’s not far off my size, a few inches taller but a few pounds lighter, and we ended up rowing several races together. I tell her I got her in good practice for renewed motherhood the time I got dry heaves toward the end of a long race, and we went out together in a double a few times when she was pregnant with her pulling lightly and me pulling hard but at the same slow rate (good training).

Somewhere in there I nom’d her Egret here; it’s partly because she does have a long neck, one of the things that T2 once said attracted him to her, and partly because of a literary mistake on my part. I was right in thinking that her real name is involved in the Caucus Race in Alice in Wonderland, but as it turned out wrong in thinking an Egret was another of the racers. (It was actually an Eaglet.)

She’s a funny one: she’ll tell you more than you want to know about her sex life, but until she really trusts you she won’t say anything about her problems, worries, or upsets. Even her hobbies only come up gradually; I think it was really only not long before they moved away for a year in Ireland that I learned that she liked to read, but since she only mentioned Diana Gabaldon, whom I’ve never read, we never discussed books all that much. It was only when we visited them in Ireland I learned that she’s an accomplished knitter. It was only on this most recent visit that I learned the breadth of her reading taste; she’s in the middle of a reread through Thomas Hardy. (I’ve never read him either, mostly through a distaste for the unhappy endings I expect from him, but I really should. Egret says The Mayor of Castorbridge ends happily, anyway.)

Rudder and I both enjoy playing with other people’s kids, too, and Egret and T2 now have four under five. The dynamics among them were interesting; I never really believed the bit where the oldest boy is always the leader, a la Lewis, Nesbit and many others, but those kids really do map well onto the Pevenseys; ‘Peter’, at the ripe age of four, clearly feels it’s his responsibility to lead the others and to interface between them and the adult world. His twin, ‘Susan’ is shyer, more cautious, and is currently into full Disney Princess mode so everything is long hair and pink and Ariel the mermaid. ‘Edmund’ is not spoiled or treacherous, but is currently into the full-blown Terrible Twos, and his twin ‘Lucy’ is just a darling. (Currently, if you draw her anything – a heart, a princess, an alligator – there has to be three of them, a daddy heart, a mommy heart, and a baby heart. Or you “read” to her, which consists of her pointing to and naming everything on each page. It’s pretty cute.)

They are pretty exhausting, though, and I can see how Egret and T2 have things arranged to give each other a break when possible. They do something sensible, too: I’ve never understood why so many kids now stay up so much later than I and my friends got to (though I think part of it is spending time with working parents) but these four are sent to bed fairly early. After baths and a book, everyone’s in bed and Egret and T2 have a little time together, and that’s when we got to catch up with them. So there I was, with a glass of wine, sharing a couch with someone who was wearing socks she’d knit herself with Far Fron the Madding Crowd turned face-down next to her, as we all tried to catch up on a few years worth of rowing stories, and I sort of thought, “Oh, yeah. Old friends. This is what it’s supposed to be like.”

It was a good moment. It was a whole good visit, in fact.

I don’t feel right not writing at least a bit about T2, because he’s my friend too, as well as Rudder’s. He can trash talk and poke fun sometimes a bit too far, but under it is the kindest heart I know. It was also kind of fun to hear the North Carolina accent peeking in, now they’ve moved back to where he’s from.

It hasn’t escaped my notice that if we bought property in NC or TN, we’d be close enough to pay visits to Melissa and Mechaieh and T2 and Egret, and to go race with the latter. This is definitely one major benefit to the region, even if it’s not mentioned in the MLS listings.