Dinner with Friends

I have mentioned my group of friends before – we are "sisters of the heart." I think we are like a marriage but even better – our divorce rate (I mean us, the "sisters") is a whole lot lower than for all those other married couples. We have been a loyal group of five for just endless years (around 30) and we have never sought out a younger, firmer replacement, nor have we had illicit and clandestine meetings with anyone we would think were filling our needs better than the other four members of our group. We have occasionally had a sixth person – usually a daughter, sometimes a mother. Our mothers have all passed away and now we are running through the daughters as our sixth.

The five of us are J1, J2, J3 (me), S, and C. I say their initials only because they would freak if I publicized our antics for strangers to read and they would slap their hands over their mouths if someone actually knew who I was talking about. So – a lot of subterfuge going on.

We meet once a month for dinner and our conversations are laced with gossip, sex, sagas, episodes, tears, laughter, and on into the night. We choose different places throughout Spokane for our monthly gathering. We tend to forget that there is anyone else present in our space – like the waiter or waitress. Waitresses seem to understand what we are talking about; waiters always come in at the very end of a topic or at the peak of a topic and walk away thinking we are discussing all the steps in making love to our mailman without our husbands getting the drift, only we were actually talking about our dogs being bred to raise pure bred puppies. Like I said – men tend to get a small piece of the whole story and walk away with a whole new story on us. Out of context. Really!

We share intimate details of our lives while enjoying each other's company for these monthly trysts.

For example, J1 had breast surgery, which she paid for herself, to make her more endowed. We individually went with her to the restroom at one of our dinners to have a viewing. It caused quite a lot of heads turning, people buzzing, what's going on – and hard to explain that NO we aren't doing an imitation of Larry Craig. After all the ooing and ahhing, we settled down for dinner and J1 passed a sack to me of her cast off bras, which slipped in the hand-off and spilled all over the floor of the bar we had decided to eat in. So – here I am, blushing the color of a tomato, gathering up various "practical" bras for someone who obviously doesn't really have a use for them. But there you have it.

We get along fairly well for being almost sisters. We have our moments of sibling angst. But we work through it. One of us usually has some major trauma/event to discuss at dinner and we are fairly decent about sharing our two hours together so each of us has a chance to spill our hearts – whether for five minutes or for 30 minutes, whatever we need. We have no rules. We aren't judgmental, well, rarely. I'm sure when two of us get together away from the others a little judgment might happen.

To be continued, for sure. . . .

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