Samain                                                                               Closing Moon

Lunch today with Ode, discussing a brochure, a sales book for our house at the Birchwood Cafe. Dinner tonight with Tom, Roxann and Kate at Cafe Zentral. Each of these moments, extending friendships, adding to the years of time together, and in that sense not all that remarkable, are nonetheless remarkable. And poignant.

At lunch today Ode passed me as he came to sit down, placed his hand a moment on my shoulder. In that brief touch was twenty-five years of shared history, of knowing each other. We ate, spoke of our move to Conifer-“This is really happening,” he said.-his upcoming long trip to France with Elizabeth, about the cutting boards he was making of exotic woods. Then, we discussed which pictures, what words, might help that one person or couple see our property as their next home. And we were done.

Kate and I came early to Cafe Zentral, a relatively new restaurant at 5th and Marquette in the old Soo Line Building. The blue line runs beside it, on its way out to the airport and the Mall of America, on the way back to Target Field where the Twins play.

This place is dim, in the way that upper end restaurants often are. The food was excellent and continued that trend I’ve experienced elsewhere. That is, you get less food as you pay more for it. Gotta be one of the few products for which that’s the case.

It was not the food though, not the restaurant, not the blue line or the downtown location, but the friends. Tom and I have been Woolly Mammoths exactly the same length of time. We were initiated at Valhelga together, a year or so after the Mammoths came into existence.

Again, we spoke of this and that, but even the content of the words was not so much the point, but the being together, the being seen by each other, the acknowledging of those years, the now long years we’ve known each other.

So today I am a rich man. Rich in friends and in history. And able, thanks to long years of analysis, to say good-bye and retain these friendships. To see the parting not as final, not as abandonment, but as the closing of a chapter, the end of a period of time. I’m grateful to all these friends who value me enough to say farewell.