I phoned a friend from my days in Chicago. She is 5 years older than I am and hanging in. I was engaged to her brother when I was 16. He was 23. He died. I won’t go into details.

We have stayed in touch all through the years and I have seen her when I visited Chicago before my mom died and my sis and b.i.l. moved down to Florida.

I have wanted her to come visit but she has a heart condition and is afraid to be away from her doctors. I think she is being overcautious. I don’t think I will ever see her again. We don’t have much in common anymore. She was married briefly, had a son, and he and his wife and their children and grandchildren comprise her family now. I think it is wonderful that she has a younger network looking after her.

What I gain from our conversations is how uninformed she is and out of touch with the world, concentrating only on her day to day. She is not unintelligent but has never applied herself so her minutiae is not involving.

We double-dated a lot when we knew each other in the late 40s, early 50s. What is mildly unnerving is that when we knew each other, I was the naif, the innocent. She was the worldly wise, being 21 to my 16. She and her older brothers and sisters would tease me and laugh at my gaucheries. She is inclined to hang on to that guise of being more informed than I am. The reality of the life I have led that has gone so far beyond what she knows, does not reach her, nor impress her.

But I am fond of her and will walk carefully with her in every way, if she ever gets down here, and she won’t even know I am slowing down to accommodate her.

xx, Teal

P.S. I detected no interruption or slowdown in MyBloggers during the change to another server -- maybe it all happened while I was off the computer.