THAT'S WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR

Home sings me of sweet things
My life there has its own wings...

For some reason this morning, I couldn't get those words -- from one of Karla Bonoff's old songs -- out of my head.

Since my plane landed yesterday, I have just been taking in and mulling over in my heart all the different sights and sounds that invoke so many memories.

Here barely 24 hours and already Linda and I have been laughing ourselves into stitches..figuratively speaking, of course.

Inspired me to actually get my ol' legs moving and go for a nice, moderately-paced walk with Linda and my new four-legged friend, Jasmine! 

Home.

Ahhh...

Amazing.  I no longer have to remind myself to breathe.  It comes naturally now.  Which is a good thing, don't you think?  Vacay is so good for just letting us breathe...

Met this fun couple on my flight from Des Moines to Dallas/Fort Worth -- Diane and Eric -- and Diane and I  gabbed the whole way, laughing and singing old tv show theme songs and reminiscing about our favorite toys from our childhoods -- namely, plastic wigs!  OMG!  It was such s gift, meeting this funny, funny woman just as I embarked upon my journey home -- a laughter primer, one might say. 

It felt so good to laugh. Diane, if you are reading this, thank you!  You were a godsend! A new friend!

We went our separate ways at DFW,  I handled the Skylink from one terminal to the next like a pro, baby, and then spent spent my two hour layover trying to figure out how to access airport wifi...lol...did a little people watching...and basically just let stress ooze slowly out of my mind and body.
It's like debriefing... switching gears into vacay mode.

Or, in other words, for the first time in a very long time, I started to relax.

A mani-pedi...a little shopping at The Snooty Fox secondhand boutique... a couple of margaritas at El Pueblo... and a few glasses of sangria while sitting out in Linda's beautiful backyard under the stars, listing faint echoes of (get this ) The Guess Who (yes, they are in town, too apparently) performing down the road at a nearby park...

And more singing -- this time, singing along with old songs that make up the soundtrack of our misspent youth...and waxing nostalgic, poetic, philosophic -- I mean we waxed all but our eyebrows -- and then came to the same conclusion we always come to when we reunite:

Life is not a dress rehearsal.  Seize the day!  Celebrate good times! 

That's what friends are for!

Or, as my mentor, the late, great humor columnist Erma Bombeck once said, "Seize the moment. Think of all those women on the Titanic who waved off the dessert cart."

Having said that...I just wolfed down two delicious pieces of key lime pie as we celebrate the engagement of Linda's awesome son, Christopher, to equally awesome Alicia.

Yup. It's good to be home.