I open the front door. Two of my high school bestie’s greet me while my chocolate lab Hazel jumps on them. I grab at her trying unsuccessfully to make her behave. I hug them both.

We have had this night on the books for months. It is our attempt to finally get better about seeing one another. At least those of us who still live locally.

As they enter my kitchen I feel the years erase. If just for the night I get to be eighteen again. We all get to be eighteen again.

What a pretty place eighteen is! We are young, bold, and bright. We have big plans, all the time in the world and in our own minds we are all that. Well, at least by senior year we believe that we are.

It is before the years of divorces and loss and aging parents and real world problems. It is the oxymoron of high school. The high years combined with the lows of teenage angst. The toughest, easiest years of our lives.

They are the years of our emergence. The shared secrets. The secret crushes. The crushed feelings. The shared experience – of growing up.

They are our ‘Glory Days.’

And tonight the day is glorious again. We are not aging wives, mothers, and daughters. We are oblivious to the subtle signs of age we carry. We are unaware of each others shortcomings. We are unconcerned by the life imperfections we have garnered along the way.

I am not divorce Barbie carrying more pounds than I have in the past with possibly a little too much spray tan. I am just Colleen to them.

We laugh and look at one another with a wondrous view from the 1980’s. We still see the glory in one another. The glint that sometimes the rest of the world misses because they met us too late in life.

The ‘glorious’ spark of uncomplicated, unbridled, innocence.

We sit, sip, chat and laugh – me and these two bestie’s I will call “Daisy” and “Phoenix.” The front door opens again and another of our group, “Summer” joins us. We spend more of our present reliving our past. We pine for the other bestie’s unable to join us.

We gather ourselves together and head for the local Irish pub where the class before us is having their reunion. We push past the front door and into a bar filled with other eighteen year olds we recognize.

The night is growing old and everyone here is far into the 80’s, too.

Well into their ‘Glory Days.’

To quote Springsteen, “Glory days well they’ll pass you by.”

And they have, but just for tonight – the day is glorious again.

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