These Are the Days, My Friend

It all started out innocently enough.  There was to be a tea and bake sale in the afternoon so I got up early and spent my morning baking goodies.  While I'm not old old yet, neither am I young young. By the time my counters were laden with buns and cookies and tarts my feet were sore and my coffee didn't seem to be cutting it in the power juice department.  Never the less, I had baking to deliver, staying home was not an option.  Thank goodness.

I rummaged through my closet for something besides blue jeans to wear and headed off to town.  My day wasn't over yet.

Teas and bake sales are pretty standard affairs.  Of course there are tables of baking for sale, and raffle tickets as an extra fund raiser, plus another table offering pretty things perfect for Christmas gifts.  The rest of the space is filled with tables inviting people to sit and visit for a while.  Once my baking had been delivered and my tickets had been bought I checked out if they needed me in the kitchen.  I hadn't been asked to help out but I had come prepared to do so if they needed me.  All was calm.  I wandered back into the tea room.

There has been many a day in my life when things don't go well ... flat tires ... 'flu bugs ... burnt suppers ... broken dishes ... forgotten promises.  You know how those days go.  And I almost always stop and wonder, "What did my horoscope say about this day?"  Would I have been fore-warned about my bad luck?  Could I have avoided these troubles?  I'm not really the kind of person who keeps track of horoscopes, and I am the kind of person who tends to think we are better off not knowing what the future holds, but there's always that curiosity there.  "Could I have seen this bad luck coming?"

There is also the flip side of that coin.  There are also the times when a person could completely miss out on a wonderful experience because her feet were sore and she stayed home.  I wonder what my horoscope said about the day of the tea?  Would it have said "Get out there, girl!  This will be a wonderful day for you!"

I was all by myself so I looked for a table where all the chairs weren't already taken and asked if I could sit with those already there.  The table I chose welcomed me. 

We were hardly strangers - we were either schoolmates, or friends, or friends of siblings, or connected by marriage, or neighbours, or friends of neighbours ... or, as in many small town situations ... an intermingled web of all of these types of relationships.  Making conversation was easy.

We talked of many things ... recipes and planning Christmas dinners, which of the dainties on the plates were our favourites, how nice the weather was, health concerns within our families.  Pretty mundane stuff.

But somehow it escalated to hair dos - the good, the bad, and the ugly - and stories began to pour forth.  We all had a tale to tell, each one funnier than the one before.  There was much laughter.  We progressed to the subject of aging and we all offered examples of memory failure problems and how we tried to cope with such things.  I'm not sure when the husband stories came up but a few of these were shared too.  All women bond over husband stories.

 And then we were on to concerts we had attended; some of the performers were given glowing praise and some were so bad that the applause at the end had not been for the show, but that it was finally over.  More stories and more laughter.

The thing about small town life is that while we do know each other for our entire lifetimes, it's not like our relationships are static.  It's more like a case of life ping pong-ing us in and out of each other's orbit; going to school together unites us, marriage takes us different directions.  Having kids in the same classes brings us back together, having different jobs or hobbies creates another gap.  In the end we have a lot of shared history, but there's also lots we can learn from each other.

Time ticked by.  Other tables were emptying and refilling with fresh faces but ours remained the same.  The conversation bubbled on ... happy themes and more sombre moments.  I began to regret that this happy time would soon come to an end.  Who could have ever guessed that this afternoon would have held such fun?

Once or twice one or another of us would make some mention of it being time to go, but it seemed we were all reluctant to break the spell.  Somehow the topic of conversation moved on to our late '60s school years and the fashions of the day: the tie-dyed shirts, the modified bell-bottomed pants, the bleaching, the embroidery, the platform shoes, the velure fabric.  The words from Mary Hopkin's 1969 hit popped into my mind; it seemed the perfect thing to do - I sang the first line and these wonderful women, my old/new friends joined in ...

Those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end! 
We'd sing and dance forever and a day. 
We'd live the life we'd choose, we'd fight and never lose. 
Those were the days, oh yes, those were the days!

The people at the other tables probably were wondering what we had in our coffee that they didn't have in theirs.  Maybe they had been all along.

The truth is whatever it was that settled over our table can't be bottled and it can't be forced.  Call it Karma or Fate or Voodoo, it felt like magic to me.  Long after we parted ways the memories continue to bubble to the surface and I find myself laughing again.  

And the idea strikes me to change the words to Mary's song to the present tense:  "These are the days, my friend!"  Days like that are pure gold.  I wonder what my horoscope had to say about it?