Blogging from A to Z April Challenge: F

Aging: The good, the bad, and the Tolerable

F is for Friends

On our weekly Zoom meeting, Lois is recounting all the things that have gone wrong with her day. It’s pathetic. She is seriously outlining the details until she looks up at the screen and sees me with my hand over my mouth to stifle my laughter. She joins in.

We met in the late 70s when we both returned to school to get our baccalaureate in nursing. Very soon we found that we were not to be trusted to sit side-by-side in the classroom. I never understood how our nursing professor didn’t kick us out when we sat in the back of the class doubled over in hysterics. The class was about Nursing Theories, a dry, boring topic, but considered essential to our growth as professional nurses. I so well remember that laughing episode because I couldn’t catch my breath. I thought I would die. And our instructor continued to drone on.

When we met, Lois and I were already nurses. We were married, each of us had two preteen children, and apparently the same inclination towards irreverent humor. Looking at us we appeared to be well adjusted adults. Pair us up and we become juvenile jokesters.

This is part of aging that I love: being in the company of old friends who know you well and don’t take everything you say seriously. Life’s misfortunes become bearable.

Now we are doing the Blogging A to Z April 2024 Challenge together. I am trying to stay sane and sober with my theme on aging, exhorting on the need to exercise as we grow older, but Lois posts a droll description of her intent to keep her 82-year-old body on her sofa under the warm comforter defying the encouragement of her son and daughter, and me, to keep moving.

After all these years, she still makes me laugh.