Nearly Thirty-Five

I thought of a friend of mine from college named MacGreggor who was in a lot of my classes at CSU. The fact that I passed Dendrology is entirely attributable to MacGreggor (Mac)'s willingness to be my study partner. I lost touch with him years ago. A casualty of graduating college and both of us scattering from Fort Collins for entry level jobs. In the daily crush of “to-do” items in my planner and the ten years of time between my feet and the CSU campus I don’t think of MacGreggor often but I did think of him this morning.

Actually I thought of one moment with MacGreggor when I was twenty-two-ish and I bumped into him at the (no lie) Déjà vu coffee shop. His textbooks laid open, he invited me to join him. We talked about classes or roommates or some such and Mac mentioned a woman he was dating.

The female inquisitor in me fired off a bunch of questions to learn more about this new girlfriend. He answered my questions but all the while fidgeted with his coffee cup, re-arranged his highlighter pens on the table. I must have asked something along the lines of whether he really liked her when (and this is the moment that came to me) he stopped fidgeting, squared his shoulders and looked at me to say “Melissa, she makes me shiver.” MacGreggor didn’t throw around words or make romantic gestures for sport. Using a word like shiver could never have been inspired by its poetic value or because he'd rehearsed it for affect. He said it because it was true.

My thirty-fifth birthday is this week. Any birthday where my age ends in a 5 or a 0 inspires the pensive mood thinking about old friends, wondering what the future holds. The pensive moment overtook me this morning, I suppose. The smell of fresh coffee rising from downstairs, Naomi bemoaning how early it was, how sleepy she felt. I caught a glimpse of my wrinkled face in the mirror as I brushed my teeth and MacGreggor came to mind. I suddenly wished we had a coffee date at the Déjà vu so I could tell him that at nearly thirty-five life is good. He could buy me a cup of coffee and I could fail to elaborate about myself but brag about my kid. I have stumbled around to find or fix up a pretty good life. The sweetness of that realization made me shiver.