Old friends...

I find that in different periods (epochs) of my life, I develop a different shared/common vocabulary with my friends during that period. Part of it is age/maturity, another part is what is happening in popular culture, and other outside influences. This language is like any other and it's fun and warming to occasionally have the opporutnity to use it, like flexing a long forgotten muscle.

When I find Germans or Israelis, I look to practice those languages, but with old friends, it's different. You can't meet a random person (as you might an Israeli/German/etc.) and just started using the code words that you used when you were 15.

Today, Tamar and I visited with our friends, Greg and Gladys. Greg was one of my best friends growing up and Gladys and Tamar were similarly close in upstate NY. As chance would have it, they married each other (or I guess from their perspective, we married each other).

Anyway, I was talking to Greg about the process through which my thyroid cancer was discovered and began, as I do with most people, describing the bump I had in my neck.

For most people, I say "it felt like either a cyst or one of those pimples you just can't pop."

Greg looked and me and said, "oh yeah, a Type D."

I burst out laughing.

When we were in Israel with our high school class in 1991, we spent a fair amount of time developing a category system for the different types of pimples which were as follows (I think):
Type A-Whiteheads
Type B-Blackheads
Type C-I don't remember
Type D-ones that couldn't be "popped"

Ridiculous? Yes, but hey that's part of it. The exciting thing is that 15 years down the road, we could still share this language with each other.