Watching mindless TV with legs stretched out

After a long-ish hiatus, Kenny is back here as Kenny, and not as the voice of this or that person based in a sprawling old house filled with family in the sleepy town of Mysore. Back to 2007, back to Mumbai.

We have some real good friends. The kinds we have spent talking to for hours on end, through the night. The thought of them gives a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. Makes us remember wonderful songs, ideas, discussions, food, drink and trips we have shared. The we is the general collective I use to talk about my husband and me together. Not that we are shadows of each other, do not possess individual selves or anything like that, just that after our (nearly) fifteen years together, it is getting hard to separate things out and say I and you, yours and mine.

Thanks to moving around so much, we have left back some really solid, gold friends at various places. Some friends moved too, leaving us back. But then, in our younger years we somehow managed to bounce right back and make some more friends in the new places. It did not take long, did not take much, to connect with people at all. Suddenly now that skill seems to be lost to us. I suspect it is just age catching up, nothing particularly to do with the kid, or longer work hours or the horrid traffic or anything like that.

Into this not-so-rosy life of ours entered this person. Sure, we had some common threads of college and what not. But was it going to stick? We felt diffident, a strange and rare emotion for us. Were we too old, too married, too tied down with family things to make real friends? There was that period when the kid would bawl her head off at the sight of any new people in the house and we would be at our wits end trying to be good hosts and parents simultaneously. We survived that phase and entered the phase where she was so happy when this friend of ours visited that she would go completely ballistic. We survived that phase too, as we survived all sorts of changes in our lives and homes.

We were at home on January 1. The new year. Portents of wonderful new things to come. The three of us. Kid asleep in the other room. We were in front of the TV watching something ridiculous and really mindless. Legs stretched out. Conversation in the form of occasional grunts. Periodic forays into kitchen for breakfast or coffee or water or snacks. No discussions, songs, trips, ideas, ideals, parties, none of that. Just a companionable silence. Something got built that day. I think we have a friend now, we are OK.