Books!  - The ones we’ve read and the ones we are going to read.  We belong to book clubs.  We talk about the chairties we support, the problems.  We talk about the part time classes we teach - from pottery to Senior Citizen awareness.  Our swimming classes and what a tyrant our instructor can be.  We share our husband’s recipes (none of us like to cook).  We love to tell jokes, sometimes on each other.  We share the latest "Maxine" jokes.  We share stories of friends who are having difficulties with health and life in general.  We bitch, we dish.  We compare "hot flashes".  We are a diverse group - we share our political views and our religious beliefs.

But most of all, we laugh with each other.   

A lot of my relationships go back to diapers.  Longstanding relationships where we’ve seen the best and worst.  We discuss everything.  Michael Jackson’s nose, Lindsey Lohan’s nose, Amy Winehouse’s nose, Edith Sitwell’s nose.  We discuss health issues, work, time constraints, death, what does it all mean?, religion, books, movies, fashion, killing slugs, recipes for white chocolate mousse cake, our dream spots, our dream homes, what we would want if everything could be perfect, why Art Smith flutters his hands so much on Top Chef Masters, the importance of bacon to men.  It’s endless.  People who remove flowers from graves, women who use babies as media attention tools, dermabrasion, what we would have altered if we could afford to do it all at once, deadheading geraniums, that list passage in Tender is the Night when Nicole Diver displays a mind boggling bend toward consumerism and possessions, the Murphys, Dorothy Parker’s comments about F. Scott Fitzgerald in his coffin, egg cocotte, nursery food, food porn, the best recipe for blueberry muffins, seasonal eating, slub in summer fabric, 40 carat gemstones, Gael Green’s hats, hollyhocks, black tulips, white gardens, Princess Diana’s wedding dress, the trend of strapless wedding dresses, infidelity, divorce, despair, decades of bile, disruptive intestinal tracts, reading maps, smelling paper in old books, the aesthetics of holding an old book viz Kindle. Oscar Wilde and absinthe.  The return of absinthe to bars. Creme Yvette, the violette liqueur as holy grail.  Duchesse satin. How to wear a tiara. Tsarist jewels, Cecil Beaton and cellophane. Blue Wave Business Marketing. Recession food.  The 80/20 Principle. Rigor mortis stories. How to have more vigor stories.  And that’s just recently.