Today I only worked for half a day, then I joined the Daughter of Denni, her mom, and a bunch of her friends to celebrate her last round of chemo. We met at Vintage, where I had a chocolate beer (not very Lenten of me) and bought soft pretzels for the table. Someone else bought chicken Rangoons, which I didn't even know were a thing but they're delicious, and someone bought cheese curds, while the Wife of Denni got nachos for her daughter because she had been jonesin' for them, having had to eat soft food for months. At first it was just a few of us, and the place was pretty quiet. I knew the others from the annual bike ride the Daughter of Denni would do for her birthday, but they all knew each other better. Then more people started coming that I didn't know, but one woman and I started chatting about pets. She seemed young... and then she said she had just turned thirty in December. It's always a weird feeling when you're at a party and realize you could easily have borne the person you are chatting with, and not even in a stretchy kind of way, like, "Well, if I were a teenage mother..." but like it wouldn't have been strange at all. I had the same feeling when talking to a grad student who wondered what I remembered about the Berlin Wall falling, since he hadn't been born yet. It always seems weird to be able to have adult conversations with people who could have been my children. Maybe the Wife of Denni feels the same way about us, since she probably could have been the mother of any of us at this gathering, and quite possibly the grandmother of the woman I was chatting with, yet we can all talk like equals. Isn't getting old weird?
Famous Hat
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