Who Says Sleepovers Are Just For Kids?

My friend Pam and I got together for three days of girl-alone time.

I love to tease Pam that she’s my oldest friend, even though she’s younger than I am. But we’ve known each other since first grade.

I was maid of honor for her wedding, and she would have been matron of honor in mine if Murray and I hadn’t eloped.

I left Missouri in 1989, and we haven’t seen each other much since then. In 1999 when we moved from Wichita, Kansas to New York state, we stayed one night in Columbia, Missouri with Pam and her family. In 2008, Pam came to my father’s funeral. That was the last time I’d seen her.

But we keep in touch with emails and occasional phone calls. Pam is great about sending birthday cards to everyone in the family, and just fun cards at any time. She is the one I contact when I need prayer for serious difficulties.

For a few years now, we’ve been talking about getting together. Pam said she would come to Cleveland to visit, and I suggested we stay in a hotel together, just the two of us. Why not have a sleepover for ladies in their 50s?

In January this year, Pam said, “let’s set a date.” We picked the second week of May.

Pam’s vacation started at the airport. She said this was only her second time to fly, and she had no idea where to go. But she asked people for help, and met a good handful of interesting new people to talk to. God bless her—she told people she met about my book that was just released.

We had a hotel suite. Hotel rooms are never easy for me to orient to. This had a bed, couch, bathroom, kitchenette, desk, and a big flat screen TV sticking out in the middle of the room. We got there on Tuesday afternoon. I told Pam, “You know, by Friday morning when we leave, I just might have figured out how to get around this room.”

I don’t watch TV, so it was fun sitting with Pam and watching Dr. Phil and Judge Judy. We watched CSI, and shows about building tiny houses and cooking shows where chefs and their mothers prepared a meal from shopping to cooking and presentation in one hour. And a show about alligator hunting. Maybe not what kids watch at their sleepovers, but it was a fun new kind of entertainment for me.

And oh yes, we talked. About our husbands and kids; about Pam’s grandchildren, (I’m still far too young to have grandchildren); about our families and work and old school memories from forty years ago; about our pets. We prayed and read the Bible together.

We brought lots of different kinds of snacks and ordered in food. And oh how we laughed. Long and hard.

I guess our sleepover wasn’t that much different from kids’ sleepovers, except that we have long-ago memories to share, which made them even sweeter and funnier. And so many stories to tell of things that happened during the years that passed when we weren’t together.

I heard Pam tell her sister over the phone, “We started talking like it was just five minutes since we were last together. That’s how close we are.”