The morning of a holiday stroll usually dawns in quiet and somewhat-surprising simplicity. After building it up in my mind since the last one, it usually feels less exciting than memory serves – not anti-climactic like Christmas, but more seriously resonant, as though there was something slightly somber at work. Spending time with good friends is, after all, serious business – and when you’re friends have become your chosen family, it means even more.
On the day of this stroll, Kira and I woke early to have breakfast at home – an egg nog bread pudding that turned out to be divinely sinful, or sinfully divine depending on how you like to look at things. (It’s just a regular bread pudding recipe switching out the milk with egg nog – you can cut out some of the sugar based on the sweetness of the egg nog if you’d like, but since it’s the holidays I left it all in – the sweeter the better!)
Walking that off was a requirement, so we headed out on our own little stroll through Southwest Corridor Park, where the holly was showing off its own holiday efforts.
We procured some food stuffs for the arrival of JoAnn, and on the way back stopped at the lobby of the Lenox Hotel.
This hotel always reminds me of a happy birthday celebration that Andy and I had in their Judy Garland suite. There was a gift lion we named Lenox in our room for that 40th birthday stay, and a larger version of him now sits atop the fireplace mantle, warming himself as any lion would on a cold Boston day.
We returned to the condo, supplies in hand, and set about to putting together a bit of charcuterie and this merry mocktail for the three of us to enjoy, as none of us drinks liquor anymore. My how times have changed…
The eager excitement of waiting for a dear friend like JoAnn lent the afternoon a glow of anticipatory delight, and as I saw her approach, Kira went down to let her in. Once we had settled into our seats around the table overlooking Braddock Park, the new Cher Christmas album went for its first spin, and as we listened to the music, we reminisced over our twenty-five years together. The three of us met back in the fall of 1998, and somehow found ourselves in this very same city a quarter of a century later, reunited and celebrating the holidays more like family than friends. Our stroll to dinner felt almost like a foot-note to the giddy magnitude of simply being together and talking again, but it held its own enchanting sway (a green woolen cape added to the traditional notion of a stroll).
Sharing a history with such good people gives warmth to any season, but being able to be with them for the holidays warms my heart in a way that I especially appreciate this year. A lot has happened since we first started hanging out at John Hancock so many years ago, and somehow we’ve been able to maintain our friendships despite time and distance and all the things life had in store for each of us.
Our holiday stroll weekend, set once again where it all began, was reaching its end. We were together again – and together we remembered the way life had been – and we could laugh before letting it go.
