Last week I flew to Seattle to see three of my BFF’s from college.

The trip was conceived totally off-the-cuff one day on Facebook, and it actually came to pass. There seemed throughout the entire planning phase such a high probability of someone, any one of us, flaking out. The amazing thing is that each one of us committed and here we are all arriving in Seattle on an early August morning. Mari is driving to the airport three times to accommodate each of our arrivals.

Andy arrives needing a rabies shot because of an unfortunate incident in which he whacked a bat in his house several times with a broom. The jokes start immediately ahem, flying – Is he foaming at the mouth? Is he going to turn into a vampire? What if he tries to bite us in the middle of the night?

Friday night finds us eating dinner with Kelly, another friend from Bard. Her husband is a chef and we are eating in his restaurant. Kelly has seated us in the back of the dining room so we can “be as loud as we want”, which is a polite way of her saying that she knows what we are capable of. Namely, we will talk about genitals … loudly, which others might find offensive. We eat pork belly and clams and drink glasses of rose.

The restaurant is located inside an old house and Kelly tells us it has a ghost that visits named Matilda.

When Nicole gets up to go to the bathroom Mari calls out helpfully to let her know the light switch is located on the outside of the door. The second she is gone we discuss how we should go over and flick the light on and off. “She’ll go again”, says Andy calmly.

Sure enough later in the evening – after more glasses of rose – Nicole makes a loud and dramatic speech for the whole table. “Hey Matilda listen!”, she says, “I’m sorry you’re uh… stuck. You are dead, but we are alive. You know – ALIVE and we are enjoying these bodies. So sorry Matilda.” She has just defied the ghost Matilda to show herself and with that she stands up and makes her way to the bathroom again. “Could there be a better set-up?” Andy asks dryly and he sneaks across the wooden floors to flick the lights on and off in the bathroom while Nicole is peeing. We are all quiet listening. She hops out of there and catches him trying to run back to the table. We laugh so hard, I can feel stress leaving my body. “You!” she says at everyone seated at the table, “Holy Shit. You scared the crap out of me”.

Kelly takes us on a tour of the restaurant, which leads us down to the basement. There are cases and racks of wine against the walls and Mari pokes her head into a closet and screams “Oh my god I just saw a pair of eyes!” We all scream and jump, but it turns out to be a fur hat with the face of some poor creature worked into the design. But that’s not all – the closet is filled with furs and hats and stoles. Apparently they came with the restaurant. Two seconds later we are playing dress up with abandon. In pure dork fashion I start babbling, “I think this closet leads to Narnia!” By this time Mari is wearing the hat with a face (which is un-bee-live-able because she is the same girl who hated squirrels so much that they could bring her to tears in college). We all start trying on furs and posing for pictures and having the best time.

At the end of the weekend sitting on the plane, I overhear the older woman sitting next to me talking to a flight attendant: “I can get pretty crabby myself because the world has changed so much”. But for now, at least, I feel the opposite of crabby. I feel like saying, “Hallelujah I am still me, and the world hasn’t changed that much”.