Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

We had visitors this afternoon, including two of my oldest friends: Elly, who I met sometime in the 1980s and who then lived next door to us for several years, and Alan Rosenthal, who I met at a party in Velma's living room in 1983, where we proceeded to talk for several hours. Alan was living in Toronto then, and we visited back and forth moderately often. He then moved to Seattle, meaning less frequent visits, but even if it takes a year for one of us to realize we haven't talked in a while, the conversations are always comfortable.

The third guest was Alan's partner Jeanne, another cool person but one I haven't known nearly as long. Just conversation and admiring the cats; I mentioned the German citizenship paperwork, and some of the conversation was to do with Covid and vaccines and such, and otherwise we talked about random things.

Jeanne and Alan live in the Bay Area; they spent Thanksgiving with Elly in Salem, after visiting Alan's father in Toronto.

Ideally, this visit wouldn't have been the day after my mother left, but Alan and Jeanne are flying home tomorrow, and I didn't want to miss the chance to see them while they were at least vaguely nearby,

cattitude and I spent yesterday afternoon and evening with Alan, his partner Jeanne, and Elly, an old friend we'd fallen out of touch with after she moved to Massachusetts in 1999 to raise a nephew. Since Alan and Jeanne were visiting her, we saw all three of them, which was a nice bonus.

There was much good conversation, some admiring of our cats, and plenty of Scrabble. Alan and I have always had the kind of friendship where a couple of years dropped because of busyness, depression, or what-have-you didn't matter; yesterday's conversation felt like I may be able to reconnect smoothly with Elly, too, though fifteen years of "so what have you been up to" will almost certainly feel different than, or take longer than, two or three.