Friends Reunited
(Mum and an old friend, Alan: Glasgow, UK)
My mother has spent the past two days in Glasgow, mainly for one of our not so infrequent jaunts to the theatre. This time it was the Trocks, or Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. It was, as ever, uproarious in the extreme and they didn’t disappoint. We sat next to two older ladies who pestered us throughout the intervals with queries about the show, if the dancers were the same as last year and if their repertoire had altered. I pacified them with the programme from my last visit which they pored over, checking each ballet dancer in turn. The conclusion; females of an elderly persuasion genuinely enjoy comic ballet with men in tutus, and – it transpires – feel very protective towards them.
Shortly before coming to Glasgow, my mum was receiving notifications from ‘Friends Reunited’ about a university friend she hasn’t seen in about *ahem* thirty years. She rooted through all her old photograph albums and found a single image of three students, their friend Meg, my mum and him dressed in costume, he was a witch or some other long nosed, behatted creature. Once she discovered he lived in Glasgow, she decided to instigate contact and meet with him. I became parley to this information only a few days ago and when I asked what this Alan character was like, she produced this single, faded photo where his entire face is obliterated by the rolled up cone of paper that formed his comically elongated nose (If you can see, he is the one in the centre with a hat and my mum is on the right). Not much to go on. We decided to meet him together yesterday afternoon in a café in Glasgow. I made a gentle jest that he might tell her he would be wearing a red carnation in his lapel or something equally cliché. Instead, he turned up in a black shirt with a huge grin.
It was such an interesting exchange to watch; these two people were once close friends and then lost touch after leaving university and now were seeing each other for the first time in three decades. In that time, so much had occurred; they had each married, had two children each, put them through university, travelled different parts of the word, gained extra qualifications and most visibly from that photograph, they had aged. I got the impression that fundamentally, neither individual has changed very much from the frizzy haired youngster they were in the 1970s, but the world has changed around them. Economic depressions, wars, hardships, loss, the joy* of having children, creating a family, carving a career niche for themselves have all culminated in the person they each met again. I found myself catching a glimpse of my much younger mother though the anecdotes and memories they reminded each other of, and of the quiet satisfaction they both tangibly felt that the person next to them hadn’t irreparably altered in all those years.
I found myself liking Alan almost instantly. I suppose because he felt so at ease meeting an old friend, I was merely an extension of that re-meeting. I recall him mentioning that the meeting felt less like a continuation of their prior friendship, but a newer chapter where he seemed to hope a new friendship would develop. Oddly enough, although their careers moved in opposite directions from graduation, he works closely with computers and my mother works with manuscripts, they actually both catalogue and archive in much the same way. Anyway, I felt I had to document the meeting, just in case it was a unique occurrence. Alan is holding a copy of the photograph that my mother has given him, though thankfully the details aren’t perceptible.
* I say with some irony.
– Today Rosie is balancing spending time with mother, running out of printer ink and panicking about this OxFem gig tomorrow in Glasgow, Scotland –
[...] all things), reintroducing himself after fifteen years. This is something completely new for me. My mother had a similar experience this year, meeting an old university friend after twice that length of time with pleasing [...]