Not our plane, but an amazing recreation.

As it turns out, it takes about five hours to fly 2,300 miles to the east and forty years into the past. Laner and I boarded our US Airways flight last Saturday morning and settled in for a long one. The ‘third’ in our row was a gentleman who was traveling with his young family across the aisle. He cheerfully informed us that it wasn’t his kids’ fall break from school; rather, he had pulled them out of class because a trip to the nation’s capital would be more educational than silly ol’ school, anyway.

Laner, a first-year teacher, was unamused.
There’s not much to see at a zillion feet. It wasn’t until we began the descent into Reagan that we could start identifying anything. Unlike the one time I changed planes in DC when we flew in over the Potomac, we could only see the Pentagon this trip.
For the record, it has five sides.

Not my Pentagon, but an amazing recreation.

While I was excited to see the iconic buildings of our government, my first order of business was to meet up with my oldest friend in the world. (Note: that’s just shorthand for “person with whom I have the oldest friendship,”  not the literal “oldest person I’m friends with” translation. My oldest friend is Bob Fox, but that’s a different blog post.)
I don’t know a time when I did not know Jenny. I don’t know how we met. I only know that I have always known her. Her older brother, David, was besties with my older brother Patrick, and I don’t know how they met, either, and there’s only one of them left to tell us. (I sense an essay question for David coming up.) Suffice it to say that many of the pictures of Patrick contained in this blog were taken by David. She learned to play Risk when I did, at our brothers’ knees; we played Barbies incessantly; and traversed the 486 feet between our houses almost daily.
When we moved away, however, we drifted apart, and it was only through the miracle of the Internet, aided by its patron saint, St. Zuckerberg, that we were able to connect again. When Jenny heard we were coming to DC, she immediately and generously offered us a place to stay.
I expressed concern. “It’s been FORTY YEARS,” I stammered. “What if I get there and you hate me? That’s a long forty-eight hours.” She dismissed concern, and planned to pick us up at the airport, which is no small trip: twenty miles or so through daunting DC traffic.
And so I stood on the curb at Reagan International and waved at a woman I would have known anywhere: she literally has not aged in all this time. We hugged, piled into her van, and headed out to Fairfax, where she showed me how hosting guests is done. We were taken out to dinner (I had a Jack Daniels burger!); we were installed in her sons’ bedrooms (sorry, Michael! I hope the blow up bed in the living room was okay, even if you could play xBox all night); our nightstands held thoughtful little baskets of crackers and bottled waters and hand lotion and Kit Kats.
Best of all, we started to catch up…on our respective parents and siblings, and on our spouses and kids. That took a while, all the way into Day 2.
© E. Stocking Evans 2012