Women Who Travel in Packs

I have this wonderful group of women friends. We get together once a month or more often and have lunch together and talk each others' ears off while we play board and word games, even something as dorky as charades and as old-fashioned as croquet, and we don't give a hoot how silly it sounds or seems.

Through our lives and work, through our individual art and love of life, through graduations, weddings, grandchildren, husband's and our parent's illnesses and more, we have bonded over the past few years. World travelers, old friends, a New Zealander, two artists, a nutritionist and a couple of writers make up our circle.

As I just typed that word 'circle', I remember in a sudden flashback those popular sweater pins worn back in the early 60's, a perfectly plain gold or silver circle pin? Called 'a virgin pin' in some regions and where I grew up. I am thinking we Game Girls need those pins for our group, even though our virginity was part of the dark ages, long ago in our lives, the circle kind of symbolizes what we are to each other.

There is a real sense of freedom inside our friendship. (Women can be the best for each other.) The laughter is contagious and constant. We are smart women, mothers, wives, artists, professionals, lovely, unique, each with our own style--shoes and jewelry always being hot topics--and are truly strong-minded women who are not afraid to say what we think, and never condemn each other for that freedom of opinion. Even without croquet mallets in hand, we are each of us Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts.

Once a year we travel somewhere together for a long weekend, usually by train so we can play games all the way there. We do it April because that month fits to each of our lives, and our weekend is called our Enchanted April. There must be something oddly joyous and contagious about us, because en masse in our travels, we have been befriended, helped, adopted and handled by train attendants, drivers, conductors, restaurant managers, waiters, bartenders, cross-dressers (a long story about Portland) and hotel clerks. We have been whisked past ticket lines and crowds, luggage conveyors, and freely given huge conference rooms in which to play hours worth of Five Crowns. Next year is our first cruise together and I am hoping the captain will adopt us and feed us champagne and lobster.

A certain togetherness has stolen its way upon each of us, and now we find we are as necessary to each other as air and light and the laughter we bring together. It's almost funny, as in odd or obsessive, the way we fight like anything to keep from missing a game day, not because of the games, but the communion of women. I think we would finagle, hire sitters, cars and drivers, and ask friends to substitute for any other obligation we might have that day, including surgery...we would even lie to never miss our day.

These ladies came to my hometown signing for this new book on a sunny Sunday in boas or hats or jewels, charming the bookstore, bearing balloons and lattes (this is the Pacific Northwest) and gifts and smiles for me as I read from THE DAYS OF SUMMER. I gave them margaritas afterward.

I have been writing and signing books in some form or another since 1990. I have been displayed in malls, sitting at bookstore endcaps, in the front of supermarkets, at tables of writers for charity events, on a author tour bus, at women's shows, and have even been the KMart Blue Light Special "Welcome KMart shoppers. We have a special today on...romance authors!"

But you know something? Until a couple of weeks ago on that Sunday, I'd never had a signing with such joy in the air. It was a highlight of my writing career, certainly of my signing and reading events, and something I will never forget. Every one of them wanted to be there and hear the words I read and read the story I told.

How do you balance on a life scale, friendship with love and love with friendship? Many people have a mate or partner who they believe is a best friend. Ah, but I am luckier than that. Both my husband and I had our friends and best friends, both together and as couples and separately. Many of the girls I grew up with and are still part of my life, and the men they married became not merely my old friends, but our friends and his friends.

As I think about the relationships in my lifetime, over years, through the years, and even around some of them, I realize how lucky we are not to be alone in this life. And I think I need to write about friendship soon, as well as family and love and life.

This is on my mind now, before the holiday of the 4th and as I get ready to take off next week for book events in Southern California, where I grew up and some of my oldest friendships began and are still strong. I will see some of the women I met when I was in seventh grade and in high school, women who were in my wedding, and my parents' friends, and some family, too, all who are part of who I have become and how I have lived, perhaps, small pieces of the people I create on the pages of the books I write. I'm thinking maybe the Game Girls need their own story, all made up of course.

Have you every wondered how book ideas come to writers? This is how. Our ripe minds and thoughts go somewhere nostalgic or wondering, and the next thing you know, a new book comes to you.

I wonder at life and God and Fate and our universal and individual master plan, about how something precious can be taken away, but then some other kind of gift comes to you when you least expect it, when you think you have conquered life and its downs and tragedies and screw-ups. Right out the blue it comes upon you, around, embracing you, and your life is changed forever. So I don't believe in coincidence, in happenstance or life's contrivances, such lightweight words used by those who are blinded to or afraid to go inside the depth of life and human nature. I believe in destiny and Fate and God and a master plan. I believe that each of us has an individual human geography. I am lucky because the women friends I have are the bedrock of my life map.

Jill Barnett