As If We Never Parted

Friendships are very interesting things to me.  Sometimes I'm amazed how human beings interact with one another, remember one another, and how we can even go years at a time without seeing a person and still feel like we are somehow connected.

Like a child with a roomful of toys.  He loves them all, but he plays with them in rotation.  Maybe he'll be obsessed with his toy soldiers for a good solid week, devoting all his time and attention to them.  Then he'll suddenly have a day where all he wants to do is color or play with Play-Doh.  Then it will be the dinosaurs for a month, or the stuffed bear at nights, or his Legos for a weekend.  And when he suddenly has the urge to play with the toy soldiers again, their story picks up right where he left it.  Nothing has changed.  They are still familiar to him.

Last Thursday Brian and I were heading to Salt Lake City for a 1am showing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 and decided to make the most of the trip.  We tried our best to see as many friendly faces as we could.

Our first stop was in South Jordan where I was able to catch up with two sisters who belonged to my home ward in La Junta, Colorado many years ago.  One sister is named Becky, who was just a few years older than me and who would often babysit my younger brother and sister and I.  She was always so much fun!  When my mother was single after her divorce with my father, she began to work for Becky's father, who was a doctor with a small family practice office.  Dr. Cummings and his wife sort of became our surrogate grandparents, and I would even walk to their house after school until my mom was off work.  They were a great support to my mother and a big part of our lives for many years.

Becky's sister Mary is ten years older than me, so I didn't interact with her too much when I was younger.  After she graduated high school she moved out and went to college, so the last time she had actually seen me in the flesh was when I was like 8 or 9 or 10 or so.  Pretty young.  However, in recent years, through the magic of Facebook, Mary and I have become good friends.  We have had many interesting conversations online, and I consider her to be a very wise and honest confidante.

Mary lives in Washington, but was visiting an old mission companion in South Jordan, Utah.  It's right on our way to Salt Lake City!  I couldn't pass up the opportunity to see her and introduce her to Brian, so we decided to get together.  Turns out Becky lives in Utah as well, so she came down to South Jordan also.  She was able to see her sister and she was able to see me!  So there we all were, in a house that belonged to none of us, gabbing away for hours.  It was so great to see them, and honestly, it felt so easy and natural to talk with them again.

As if we had never parted.

From South Jordan we continued on to Salt Lake City.  At 10:30pm we met up with a ragtag group of friends at the downtown Denny's.  I was calling this the Pre-Potter Pancake Party, even though I don't think anyone actually got pancakes.  I was able to see a lot of my old coworkers from Banana Republic like Ryan, Neil, Gina, Dan, Angie and Caitlin.  They all knew each other of course, but then I went ahead and invited Bath and Body Works friends as well.  Wendy, Rebecca and Mesun came and it was so very good to see them.  With the exception of Wendy, I hadn't seen any of these people since December.  I was very glad to be able to eat with them all, laugh with them all, and even play Harry Potter Scene It with them all on Dan's iPad.  It was so much fun!

And once again, it seemed like we had never parted.