On Friday, I drove to Glastonbury, CT to meet up with three old friends – Jackie and Jill Desrochers and Wendy O’Connor. We all first became friends when I moved to Marblehead, MA, in the 8th grade. Jackie, Wendy and I used to ride together and Wendy went on to become a rather successful young eventer and then she moved to Ireland after college. Though Wendy and I have stayed more or less in touch, I haven’t seen Jackie or Jill since junior high school. That’s Jill on the far left, Wendy, me and Jackie.
So, as I drove to Glastonbury, where Jill now lives, I thought about all the old times with these dear friends and I became very nostalgic and a little emotional. These girls were my friends at what was really the end of an innocent time – I know it sounds trite but its true. Wendy and I used to spend hours in her room, sprawled across her bed, listening to Elton John and studying Millers tack catalogs, talking about all the things we’d need to buy when we bought our first horse. Wendy got her first horse soon thereafter – it would be a few decades before I got mine. Wendy had two German Shepherd dogs named Cory and Terry, I had two dogs: Beau and Gus, and Jackie and Jill had this amazing little dog called Putz. Yes, Putz. Putz was a wonder dog. He was a medium-sized mongrel who I met for the first time when he came soaring over the very high bottom half of the Dutch door that led into the Desrochers’ home. He knew about a hundred tricks. We all lived on Marblehead Neck, which is like an island connected to the mainland by a causeway and every day “Putzers” could be seen by the morning commuters, making his way across the causeway to the mainland, where he would do his day’s business (there were several generations of Marblehead mutts who bore his trademark splotched coat and cocky attitude) and then in the evening he could be seen trotting back home across the causeway. He frequented Old Town, loved hanging around the landing with the other town ne’er-do-wells, meeting up with old mates and new girlfriends, checking out the shops, getting into scraps, etc. Things were different then. There were no leash laws and it wasn’t at all unusual to see dogs wandering along the aisles of Penni’s, the local grocery store.
Well, when I pulled up to Jill’s house, my head was all full of memories of our animals, and the fun we had and the trouble we got into and I thought I might just burst into tears of joy at the sight of my old friends, but when I climbed out of my truck I was distracted from my nostalgic reverie by a sound that I at first thought was a siren, I’m not kidding – it was LOUD and high and long and shrill, and as I drew closer to the house it became even louder and now sounded like the shrieking of tortured prisoners or dogs. It was scary. I was about to step back toward my truck when suddenly the door flew open and it was my dear old friends, just shrieking with laughter at me and my giant pickup truck. I can’t tell you what a coven of screaming, laughing witches we were for the next four hours, as we looked at our old yearbooks and tried to explain to Jill’s teenaged daughters why we all looked like boys. We tried to explain, but really, we don’t even understand it. Everybody in our junior high school yearbook with the exception of Wendy V and Katie W (the prettiest and most popular) looked like boys EXCEPT FOR THE BOYS, who all looked like girls.
Last night I went to a dinner party to celebrate the birthday of my dear friend Marcia, and today we took Denis to meet somebody:
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