Les Amis

Went to Oakland for a pre-Bastille Day party at the house of a friend, Catherine. Catherine is not only a good friend -- we've known each other for 20 years now -- but my ex-wife. We got married in 1984, when we were lovers; she got her green card after a couple of years, and our divorce followed that. She became an American citizen about seven years later, and works now as a drama therapist in the teen psych ward in an East Bay hospital. She has changed very little in twenty years; her French accent, despite having become more understandable, is still charming, and she looks just about as cute as she was when she was 24. Definitely still has the same figure; I know because she showed guests a lot of photos taken on a recent vacation to Hawaii with her now-boyfriend Brandy. Much of the party I just sat and watched her chitchat and play verbally with her best friend Betty, who arrived with her from France and who's known her since high school. They were so cute together twenty years ago I cast them in a theater production as St. Joan and St. Catherine in heaven, and they're just as endearing now.

If all this sounds twee and patronizing, then I'm just not diong a very good job of describing them in action. Utterly relaxed with each other, they carry on a rapid-fire stream of mixed French and English, their hands and faces flashing from gesture to gesture and expression to expression, repeatedly breaking into peals of laughter. Just two good friends talking together -- bosom buddies. As usual, I was caught between enjoying their interplay and feeling a little sad because I wasn't in the middle of their palaver -- I don't understand French -- and because I so rarely have had, in my life, a friend as close as they are to each other.