Old friends
Old friends
Sat on their park bench like bookends— Simon & Garfunkel
Meeting up unexpectedly the Sunday before last with two old school friends reminded me of so many things we left behind, even if we did love most of what was a shared experience, and experiences each of us had as individuals.
Of course, we all leave aspects of the past behind. This is to be expected. We of the Zimbabwean diaspora, however, left a whole country behind, and those roughly my age have conducted the better part of their adult lives elsewhere.
These two women have maintained their close friendship ever since school. One now lives in California, the other, in Perth, Australia. I have kept in touch via Facebook. Thanks to the latter, I chanced upon a post showing the two of them in Lisbon, where they had “met in the middle” for a short holiday together. The post said they would be in my city in the Algarve the next day. I hastily messaged them, and a couple of hours later, we were happily reunited. Was I ever glad I was not up to my eyeballs in work, as I usually am!
Our embraces on greeting encompassed decades and great distance. Here was the kind of space I love the most: a place where being yourself is easy, like a Sunday morning — although, by now it was Sunday afternoon.
There followed a flurry of questions, half-finished stories, laughter, half-finished sentences, heart-to-hearts on the sad, lyrical and serious bits, and conversation punctuated with the singing of relevant song fragments from yesteryear. It was wonderful to see the unapologetic adult women we have become.
There is a photo of us which reveals, remarkably, that our innate cheekiness combined with irrepressible affection for people in general remains intact. I wonder now whether it is those qualities that have allowed each of us to weather the vicissitudes of life better than we might have otherwise.
It turns out that none of us had any inkling of what our future lives would be. Improbable, all of it, just as this meeting was.
Two days later, we got to spend another couple of hours together in and around my apartment, which served as a useful repository for luggage in the hiatus between their accommodation exit time and train departure for Porto.
It was an honour and a pleasure to share a little of their holiday, and to realise in the nicest possible way that something I said to my Dad years ago still holds true: people never change; they simply become more so.
I spent a few days afterwards realising that I dispensed with a ready narrative about myself long ago—a narrative which perhaps could have given more complete or more interesting information. It does not bother me that much, for both these women are perceptive, and if we believe that the trajectory of the future includes additional encounters with each other, we can carry on the conversation then.
Two among many amusing things still have me smiling. The first was the reaction from one of these friends when I told them that Afonso III, before whose statue we stood, was the king who expelled the Arabs—the Moors—from the Algarve, claiming it for the Kingdom of Portugal. As a mark of loyalty to her roots, she mock-spat in mock jest at him. And then we took photos of both of them in front of this monument.
I was laughing, also slightly tipsy, so forgot to tell them that al-Gharb, meaning, “the west” in Arabic, is where the name of the Algarve comes from. Perhaps one of the tourist pamphlets did the honours, I do not know. At least laughing prevented me from veering into the phonetic switch of /b/ and /v/ that occurs more frequently in dialectical speech in the North region of Portugal, not unlike the switching of /l/ and /r/ in many African languages.
The second amusing thing came when they said they liked the shirt I was wearing on Tuesday, a multicoloured casual cotton shirt from Nepal purchased in a shop run by a man from Goa (squeezing in the historical bit about Vasco da Gama sailing there), just down the train track from me in Olhão. I said I had also acquired a couple of pairs of loose-fitting long cotton pants of a similar design. They replied in unison, “Oh, happy pants”. Excellent name to describe crotch freedom, I thought. “Yes, happy pants”, I said.
Bookends--the perfect metaphor for this story--and the relationship!
What a wonderful catch up, and I often think of Dad sayings like “people never change they just become more so” . Beautifully written