If you’re going to make lifelong friends, do it when you are young. Do it when you are in graduate school, with beautiful, gifted, smart people who know how to frolic with abandon. Do it when you have enough physical and emotional energy to squander, when you can burn your candle at both ends and in the middle and when you fully believe that the purpose of life is to enjoy it.

When you do that, you find that when, 30 or more years later, you connect with those old friends again, your mind automatically makes the assumption: I am with these people now. Therefore, I must be 25 years old and smart and beautiful and invincible. Never mind that you have become crippled with arthritis, that your overnight bag contains prescription drugs and sleep aids rather than bikinis and bangle bracelets. You are able to turn back the hands of the old grandaddy clock and once again become that person you were before life’s little tragedies sucked out the juices and wrinkled your skin.

Last weekend, we had 3 glorious days in the mountains with a couple who had been our best friends during our halcyon days. Although we hadn’t seen them for ten or so years, we fell back into the old relationship, as we always do, as easily as if we had never hit the pause button. It was a time of nonstop laughter and feeling as if we had stepped into the Tardis and had gone back 30 years.

We hiked up the hills, we frolicked in the hot tub, we stayed up (kinda) late, drank champagne without worrying about hangovers, ate junk food, had scintillating conversations about the nature of good and evil and how to solve all the world’s problems, slept well past our usual wake-up time, stressed our joints, and took our meds surreptitiously, trying to ignore the fact that we needed them.

Did we pay for it? Not really. My knees ached a bit, and yes, I did have trouble sleeping after all that champagne, but it was well worth it to pretend to be that vital young thing I used to be, married to my gorgeous hunk, in the company of beautiful, witty, people. Thank you Mike and Chris, for taking us back to the way life is supposed to be. You have brought to light the truth of what one of my best buds said to me the day 29 years ago when we left Baton Rouge and some of the best people and best times I have ever known:

“You just can’t make old friends.”