We'll always have Cleveland

The occasion for an evening in Cleveland was Angel's birthday. Since she was turning fifty and loves parties, everyone was urging her to have the bash of a lifetime, but she decided on several smaller celebrations - one for her family, one for old friends, and one for church people in Bedford Falls, where Angel's husband Rico is the minister at the Baptist church. Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold.

Gven and I stopped in Cuyahogaville to pick up Helga on the way. Gven, Helga, and Angel go way back. When Helga was in elementary school and all our baby sitters were graduate students, they would do big-sisterly things together, go shopping, out to lunch, or to the zoo. Angel and Rico asked Helga and Jessi to house-sit for their cats and plants once or twice when they were in high school, and later they had them over for dinner. They have always treated our kids as people, the way adults like to be treated. We have a huge houseplant in our den that was a tiny table ornament at their wedding. That kind of friends.

We made our way up the road to Bedford Falls, a picture postcard of an established, working-class, eastside suburb. Antique street lights, Italian restaurants, lots of trees, ravines, and a park along a tributary of the Cuyahoga. Michele was already there in her Volvo. Laurie, the one local friend whoa apparently fits the 'old friends' profile, arrived from Cleveland Heights while we were sipping our pomegranate juice.

A little background is in order. Angel, Michele, and I went to graduate school in the same program at the same time, sharing an advisor, several seminars, and a wonderful little windowless office with three other fellow sufferers on the third floor of labyrinthine Larkins Hall. It was the best of times and the worst of times, as we helped each other survive the stresses and intellectual growth spurts of our thirty-something career crossroads. I was the oldest and had two kids already but the last to start grad school. We were all making life decisions on the fly in the movement arts enclave of physical education. It didn't take Gven long to bond with Angel and her sharp sense of humor.

After graduating, Angel, Michele, and I stayed in Columbus working at this and that, while our office-mates Sarah and Bob migrated to California and North Carolina. Michele opened her own yoga and bodywork studio; Sarah got tenure teaching dance at Cal State; Bob wrote software documentation and taught yoga; Angel did counseling and taught yoga. Around the time Gven and I moved to Methodistville, Rico got the job as minister in Cleveland after years of house painting and musical theater. Gven did massage therapy and taught yoga. I baked bread, did landscaping, and edited textbooks. Just your average phys ed majors.

It was cool to see their new place after almost three years. The basement they've made into dual offices, the tradition Italian second kitchen, the tiny but beautiful back yard, the new furnace, the deer browsing across the street. We mostly stood in the kitchen watching Angel chop garlic and fry chicken while keeping up a running conversation and sipping Chardonnay, which, by the way, does not come from Chardon, Ohio, but should.

Then we ate this fabulous meal and laughed a great deal. Angel blew out a kitchen match because nobody thought to bring candles, and the cake - white sponge cake with fresh strawberries, whipped cream, and little panels of white chocolate - was outstanding. We really could have kept talking all night but declined the offered futon and finally headed home at some ridiculous hour. But it was so damn worth it. Happy birthday, Angel, and don't wait another fifty years to do it again.