"Auf der Treppe sitzen zwei
und ein Lächeln zieht vorbei"
Yesterday was catching up time between my friend Judith and I. We don't often see each other, living in different countries makes that difficult. But we grew up next door from each other. Attended the same school, primary class, secondary school. We had the same tastes and not. We were similar and yet so different. And good friends. Often, anyway.
So we meet occasionally in the hometown. When our visits coincide, which they usually tend to do over Christmas, and sometimes in the summer.
As children we used to sit in front of her house (as our house has no street entrance, and that's just boring!), on the stairs leading to the front door. We used to do this ALL the time. I am not entirely sure what we were doing, but it involved counting cars, in particular red ones, and another game that required us to stand up, run down the stairs, run to the curb, and back up. I wish I remembered what this was all about.
My sister used to show up from time to time. I remember her telling us a (nowadays quite famous) joke right there. "Sprint ein Mann vom Tisch in 'ne Tomate" (A man jumps from a table into a tomato). Yeah, she was 4 or something!
Of course we didn't just sit around. We also walked around this area quite a bit. We felt superior to most of the people here (and maybe we still do, to some extend?). In kindergarten we talked about moving to Berlin together. We eventually both lived in Berlin, but not together. In fact, we barely saw each other, living in different worlds. But I still think it's fascinating that we did.
So yesterday we caught up. We talked about the usual stuff, what we used to do. We talked about recent events in our lives. We didn't even really start to catch up, and then it was 10.30 pm. and over two hours had just passed. It was still light and hot outside. It was time to part as Judith had to have dinner, and get ready for her first holiday in eight years.
We shall try to catch up more when she comes back. I hope.
