Write About Now

For Memorial Day weekend I traveled north to Pittsburgh to attend Springfest, a yearly reunion of my best friends from college. SF weekends typically include a Pirates game, an all-afternoon picnic including cotton candy, snow cones and the ritual frying of a huge turkey, golfing, t-shirts with the year’s logo, and more–it’s quite the production. Since this was year ten (“Springfest X–everything to eXcess”) the long weekend also included a Friday night cocktail party, an optional 5k run (guess whether I opted for running or sleep) and brunch/closing ceremonies this morning.

My last Springfest was eight years ago and my last time in the ‘burgh was 2001. A move to California interrupted those relationships and it was a joy to reconnect with this dear tribe of friends I lived, studied, ate, and laughed with through four cold Pennsylvania school years.

In many ways I found our friendships comfortingly the same, and we picked up as if no time had passed. Almost as nice, however, was seeing what has changed—the notoriously short-tempered guy who has mellowed into a patient, good-humored father of preschoolers (and who kept his cool even when the four-year-old locked them out of their van minutes before departure time); the driven career woman who is now considering the timing of her first child; the lovely men and women who married my friends and joined our little family.

Some of us have money, some don’t. Some are married, some are single. Some are Christians, some aren’t. Somehow it still works, and I didn’t realize how much I missed them until I saw them all again and ate some fried turkey.