Twenty Years Hence

This morning I am thinking of friends I've not seen for more than twenty years — a man whom I met protesting at Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant who held the keys to the cars of those of us in our group when we chose to be arrested and while we "did our time" and who became a fast friend from that point forward, and a woman with

whom I read poetry and drank boiler makers in North Beach and the Mission district of San Francisco, dressed as two of the singing Supremes for Halloween, watched comets in a morning rising sky, a woman who now lives in Prague, or did, the last time we spoke and she was in New York visiting her family. I think of how people say "we talked after all this time and it was as if no time had passed", and I wish I could bring these old companions into my rooms today, introduce them to my husband, my teenage daughter, and my dog. Thanks to the wizardry of modern day technology I could, if the connections came together, "skype" them and find their faces on my computer screen, faces a little more elongated with years of worry and yet bearing the same familiar smiles, I could "meet" their wives or children,if they stared into the peephole of a camera embedded of balanced atop the monitor. I can't help but think of the television show from the sixties of The Jetsons and how they were able to see each others' faces on their floating t.v. screens, the magic windows of today. This would be gratifying on one level, to picture David and Laura like this, to nearly be able to touch them again, my hand on their arm, or my glass raised to toast our late night imaginations. Last night I did this, a virtual "high five" with Evangeline as she taught me how to do something new with my computer from 1130 miles away. She in California and me in New Mexico. We seem to have shrunk geography this way. And then, still, I walk past my daughter's morning bedroom, a room strewn with her pink pillows and discarded blue jeans, and it's the present that seeps into my heart that causes a sensation that I can only experience alone and with myself as sole witness. Dave and Laura, I miss you. Call me.

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