Wednesday, April 7, 2010

I Have Very Cool Friends

Yayyyyy! Just got off the phone with my friend Nancy. We met in 1999 when we were both training ride leaders for the Boston to New York AIDS Ride. We used to spend our summer weekends herding wobbling lines of beginning riders up and down Route 9W to Piermont and Nyack, or through Palisades Park up the big Alpine hill, or down River Road to Hoboken. We drank gallons of Gatorade, ate a million Clif Bars, had lots of fun, got really weird tan lines and very, very powerful haunches. We had many, many post-ride beers together and more laughs than I can count. Nancy has the perfect example of a "deadpan sense of humor," the kind that slides by you for a second and makes you do a double take before you find yourself in stitches.


Good times.

By 2001 both of us had bailed on New York City, and I haven't seen her since then. She moved to Chicago, met her partner, and settled down. I went to Colorado for a year, came back to NYC, and life has gone on from there. We emailed occasionally and sent each other pictures of our cats.

But now I'm grinning madly because Nancy has returned to New York! She has an amazing, super-cool job in emergency management, in which Nance is working toward a Master's (when did that become a major?), so she gets to work on really neat stuff like how do you evacuate New York City when a Category 5 hurricane takes a funny swing north, or a giant asteroid crashes into the ocean, flooding the city to the gunwales.

Did I mention how cool my friends are?

We're meeting for drinkies this Saturday at the Pony Bar, where we'll do 10 years of catching up and sample many American craft beers.

I am very, very, very excited.

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