Hour after hour, year after year, a group tightens

The Boston Herald

September 29, 2004

We've been meeting for nine years, now - nine years, once a year, for only four hours. Which means we've spent just 36 hours together. You'd think that a single friendship, never mind a group friendship, wouldn't thrive with so little time. You'd think that too much would happen between the years to be able to pick up, in conversation and in feeling, where we left off. You'd think that women who don't see each other regularly and don't share the same work or hobbies would grow apart.

Instead we grow closer.

Our children are the reason we got together. They were friends before we were: Emily, Blake, Susan, Sil, Carla, Christopher and Julie. Nine years ago, they went off to college. The first, ``Come over and we'll have pizza and wine,'' was an SOS, a way of hanging on together, getting through a difficult time. Our children's rooms were empty, our phones silent, our lives had suddenly changed.

That year at my table our conversations were all about . How they were adjusting. How they liked their roommates and their classes. How they were doing without us. And, of course, how we were doing without them.

Time passed faster than we imagined, and there we were at my kitchen table again, saying, ``It wasn't so bad, was it?'' Our kids had adjusted, and so had we. ``Will you pass the pizza, please?'' By year three we felt like veterans and survivors. Then it was four years and our children were almost finished college but we weren't anywhere near finished being together.

Now it's nine years, and a lot has changed in the big world in which we live and in our small worlds, too. There have been - besides graduations - weddings and births and deaths and illnesses and jobs lost and gained, and houses changed and lives changed, too. But this one night a year, which is always in late September or early October, hasn't changed. Liz always brings a salad in her big wooden bowl. Francesca always makes her fried sugar cookies. Anne is always late. And the pizza always comes from Denneno's. Such small consistencies. But with everything else changing - growing or shrinking, coming and going, with hardly anything standing still - the same pizza and the same wooden bowl are important.

We women are not friends because of our children anymore. They connect us but they don't bind us. We're friends now because those four hours a year add up. We've commiserated in those hours and laughed and listened to one another's worries and said ``everything will be fine'' even when we weren't sure that it would be. And most important? We've continued to show up, year after year, in sweaters, in raincoats, in sleeveless shirts, the weather inconsistent, but Liz with her bowl, Francesca with her cookies and Anne running behind. People have been added - my daughter, Lauren and her daughter, Lucy. And Lisa, a neighbor who sent her daughter off to college last year. And my other daughter, Julie, who moved back from New York and joined the group for the first time Monday night, bringing with her the only male ever admitted to this circle - her baby, Adam. Next year will mark a decade of this small, easy tradition that doesn't take any work or worry. Maybe we should do something special, I thought, as the night wound to a close. But then it struck me that we already do.