We had a small party in celebration of Margaret’s birthday this weekend, sort of a low-key affair. I tried to keep the guest list short because I couldn’t handle preparations for a large group, so if you weren’t on the invite list please accept my apologies. A group of us sat around stuffing our faces and flapping our jaws….fortunately in alternating intervals or I’d still be scrubbing the chewed bratwurst out of the carpet. All things considered a good time seemed to be had by all. Thanks to everyone who helped to pleasant up the place for a few hours.

The whole thing got me to pondering about the nature of our various friendships. Everyone has friends that fit into assorted categories: college friends, childhood friends, work friends, et cetera. In the past, Margaret and I have been somewhat leery of mixing our various friend groups. I’m not really sure why. I think that, on some level, we were afraid that people from different aspects of our lives would not find sufficient common ground to enjoy interacting with each other. This is, of course, ludicrous. It’s not like we have one bunch of friends from our hippie-liberal-arts-college days and another with whom we attend our weekly Klan rallies. There’s not even a difference as minor as, say, blue collar/white collar, though I hardly think that alone would be a deal-killer either. All of our friends are college-educated professionals, with or without children, and if we don’t all pivot on an identical political/religious/philosophical axis, we all respect each other’s opinions and the right to both have and share them.

This was borne out by our experience at the party, where friends and family from every aspect of our collective lives came together, ate, drank, chatted, and laughed our asses off. I’m hoping that I can keep this in mind for the future, because it sometimes seems a lot easier to manage to get together in medium-sized groups than it is to make–and keep–lots of individual dates with our friends. Lots of reasons for this, not the least of which that we’re agoraphobic homebodies with a pathological fear of rush-hour traffic. (Okay, I have a pathological fear of rush-hour traffic; Margaret has a severe allergy to putting up with my reaction to rush hour traffic.) Barring extenuating circumstances such as my current back problems, I’m usually happier putting in the work to feed and entertain a group of ten or fifteen friends at once than trying to get up the momentum to make it to five or six different get-togethers with smaller groups. Plus there’s an added bonus: if we’re having everyone over here, that means we’ll be forced to clean the house. Never hurts to have five or ten of your closest friends to help twist your arm. 🙂

This is by no means to say that we won’t be making dates to hang out with each and every one one of you, individually or in family groups, in the near future. But if it gets to be two or three months out and we have yet to get our schedules coordinated, would somebody please send me a link to this post, and tell me to scrub out the bathroom, clean out the grill and send out the invites? Thanks in advance.