I got to see my friend Diane this past week–and even though I am right this minute simultaneously writting this blog entry, cooking dinner, eating leftover candy corn, angsting over the upcoming election results tonight, IMing with my kids, and doing a load of laundry–I still am possessed of this hazy, golden memory of walking around New York City last Friday with Diane, conducting about six simultaneous conversations, at least five of which could have taken place twenty years ago just as easily as today.

You see, for reasons that I can’t quite figure out, Diane and I can’t seem to get our lives sync-ed up right. Since the 1980s, when we first became friends while working for the same weekly newspaper (while running that newspaper, actually), we’ve lived parallel lives, but in a consecutive universe.

When we first met, I had kids, and she didn’t. And now she has a kid just at the time when mine have vacated the premises. Sort of rotten timing, I think. How much fun we would have had taking our babies to the park together. Instead, when my youngest was a baby (okay, a hard baby), Diane and I had to conduct all our conversations while doing errands, usually while Stephanie kicked the back of the car seat and screamed.

One time, getting ready for one of these drives, while Stephanie hollered, I was counting on my fingers the list of all the things I needed to bring along: my purse, the diaper bag, the bottle of apple juice, the bag of goldfish crackers, the three pacifiers, the required four changes of clothing, the Barney book, the Grover sippy cup, the Sesame Street CD, .. when I stopped and said, “Wait, I’m forgetting something. What am I forgetting?”

And Diane said, “The stun gun?”

Over the past 24 years, we’ve gone together through disastrous love affairs, my divorce and remarriage, her marriage, her cancer diagnosis and treatment, my sister’s death, the birth of our children, lots of dinner parties, numerous health crises and hypochondriac moments, thousands of do-I-have-a-right-to-be-mad-about-this conversations, a million newspaper deadlines, probably fourteen house-moves between us, and zillions of hours of conversations, many of them in restaurants, and many of them taking place while one or both of us was crying.

Anyway, so now Diane lives in L.A., where she is the mother of three-year-old Maisie and she is married to a television writer, which means that until the television industry throws in the towel, she can never, ever leave. (She pretends that she wants to, that she misses snow and ice–which she refers to as “the changes of the seasons”–but I am from Southern California myself, and I know that not having seasons is also very good.)

It is technically possible to carry on a relationship with people who live in different time zones–but not, I think, when they have a small child. You can’t just call them up any old time you feel like it, like when you first wake up in the morning and you might like some friendly encouragement to start the day. And then, by the time they’ve finished their dinner, cleaned their kitchen and gotten their kid to bed–well, you are turning off The Daily Show and heading for sleep yourself. (If you have any sense.)

But then this past weekend her sainted husband actually gave her a weekend pass out of L.A., sans child, and we got to see each other face to face.

I think it was the first time in our twenty-four year friendship that neither of us had to be somewhere on account of a child needing us.

So what did we do? We did all the things we used to do: tried to figure out what lipstick color would look the best on us. (We both bought the same color; it turned out to look great on her and horrible on me, so now I will mail it to her.) We tried on jeans and sweaters at Loehman’s. We looked at toys we might buy and then couldn’t decide which ones to buy so we walked away without buying any of them.

We talked about our work and our husbands and our kids. We even held our favorite conversation, which is Were We Happy In The Old Days, Even Though We Were Broke and Heartbroken A Lot of the Time? (One of us always argues that we were actually quite happy because we were excited about every little improvement we could make, and we were young and we had a lot of energy and hope.)

We ate lunch at Monster Sushi, our favorite sushi place in Manhattan and stayed for hours and hours–almost until it was time to order dinner. And we did not cry.

Later we walked miles through New York, and maybe just because it didn’t feel right to be with none of our kids for a whole visit, we met up with my two daughters and had dinner.

There wasn’t any crying at dinner either. Well, except for me. Sometime between the fried tofu course and the time they brought us the green tea, I got a little teary-eyed looking around the table, feeling startled to see these two grown girls I have, and seeing them with Diane, who has been my friend forever and has been there with me to watch them turn from babies to women.

Today, back at home cooking dinner, waiting for the Democrats to win some seats in the House, I feel both grateful and greedy for more of those days in New York, those dinners and long talks and walks. And I’m aware that the day is going to come when we will have another dinner in New York–possibly after a day of trying on lipsticks and jeans–only this time it will be Diane’s current three-year-old who is the young woman across the table from us.

And when it happens–well, I just know we’ll still be having the same wonderful, comforting conversations. We’ll get to the bottom of it once and for all: Were we happy in the old days? And why were we crying in all those restaurants?