A lotta my current friends still keep in touch with or hang out with friends they met in college, even though they or their friends have moved far away. I've kept in sporadic contact with only about 3 or 4 of my friends from college; I met them in different years, and none of them know each other. A couple of my childhood friends went to Cal with me, and they are similarly fading out of my life...

I received a voicemail msg this weekend about one of them. Short message with few details... There is a shower tonite at 6pm for Amy. I'm assuming it's a baby shower, since Amy got herself hitched last summer, right here in Oakland (I barely made it to the wedding). This time, I didn't get a snailmail invitation, just the late-notice voicemail...

Amy and I were the best of friends in seventh grade, through the one year I was at Chinese Christian School. When we weren't talking face to face, we were writing letters and notes to each other to give to each other when we saw each other next, which was just an hour later in our next class or the very next day. Funny how when you're that young you can spend so much time with one person without tiring or running out of things to say... I can't remember all of what we used to talk non-stop about, but I'm sure most of it was weighty-yet-juvenile, if not supersilly girltalk/tomboy-babble that I'd be embarrassed to recall now.

By Cal, though, Amy and I had already grown pretty distant. She'd already chosen her life's direction, down the straight and narrow, through church and the bible, leading directly into Heaven. She was as pious as I wasn't. And now she's having a baby. This little bouncing bundle of joy will grow up in a nice Christian home, just as I did...

I'm proabably not gonna make it to the shower tonite. I still have some settling down to do at home, which to me is a good enough excuse, among the other better ones, not to go...