Belonging

I'm getting old.  My friends are all having kids and moving away and their parents look like what I imagine my grandparents looked like when I was younger.  I can accept this, though, I think.  Maybe.

Went to a party gathering at Kelly and Dave's new house.  It was a group of old, old friends; people I've known the better part of my life.  Kelly brought out a box of photos and started tossing pictures onto the table. The faces I saw were all of us... but we looked like children.  "Jesus," I thought, "this was so long ago."  Some of it I didn't recognize, but it was surely me in the images.

Such as this one... where I'm in a kiddy pool, fully clothed, drenched, with Ian... I don't remember this at all.

I didn't drink then.  I blame my poor memory.

So, here we are the table, formerly a field for a competitive round of Euchre; now, a container for images of the past.  I remember that I, too, have my own box of memories that I left at my father's house.  Maybe I'll go back and poke through them to see what's contained therein.

But, belonging.  Sometimes, as others do I'm sure, I wonder where I belong.  Call it identity or identifying.  Call it what you want.  But, today I found myself feeling like I really belonged.  Last weekend I purchased a pair of pink sunglasses.  I was replacing the cheap pair that I'd gotten at Goodwill to wear to work in the field.  These were cheapies from Walmart.  At work, there were lots of jabs at whether or not they were gotten from the ladies' section or perhaps they were children's glasses, etc.  I have no qualms with this, it's all in good fun and I understand this.

At our get together, I decided to wear these glasses with my straw fedora... you know, summer and all.  Perfect acceptance.  They were just a pair of glasses that Rob would wear.  For some reason that told me a lot about my relationship with these people.  Even after all these years this dynamic that we shared as teens and 20somethings still persists.  At that point I felt like I belonged there - with them -  not that I didn't feel that way prior to this, but it just reminded me.  And that was kind of nice.