To Be Invited Over for Bolognese

Not long after we began dating, Bob wanted to break up with me. He said that he didn’t feel right. He meant that his feelings for me weren’t strong enough. He was right. He was only about 24, I 22. I should have let him go. But I wasn’t strong enough.

But what does the course of events that life takes mean? Of the people currently in my personal life, who are not immediate family members, Bob is the person whom I have known the longest. We have known each other for (2024-1992 =) 32 years. (There is Chaitan Khosla, whom I have known equally long and with whom I have a reliable personal relationship. But I have contact with him only several times a year. There is Salvador Peirú, but I met him in 2004, 20 years ago.) Bob I interact with weekly, that is, his family I do with.* When his children were very young, when I lived in California, and when it was still before the pandemic, we had a routine in which I would go to their house nearly every week for dinner and play with their kids for several hours. I recall now the highly anticipated phone call that would make me so happy: “Cammy, we’re going to make bolognese on Saturday, if you’d like to come over.”

*They came to me for math lessons.