New Year's: 2000, 2009 and 2059

Nine years ago (and three years out of college), we rented a house with some of my friends from college to ring in the new millenium. We spent the weekend drinking a lot of cheap beer, singing kareoke, playing charades and laughing a lot. None of us slept very much and when we woke up the question of the morning was: Who hooked up with who last night? Even though it had been three years since we'd all lived together on the same campus, it felt like no time had passed.

Times have changed a little bit. This year, we rented a house with friends from college, but decided to skip New Year's Eve and just start the next day since we probably wouldn't be up at midnight anyway. We still drank beer, but have refined our taste a bit, replacing Miller Lite with Fat Tire. The music, originally loud Kareoke, was replaced with Toby quietly playing the guitar and charades was replaced with Apples to Apples. More significantly, the question of the morning was replaced with a new question: Who stayed up with a crying baby last night? And yet, in many ways it still felt like no time had passed.

What is it about college that allows it to be a time where such lasting friendships are formed? I think part of it has to do with the way you approach friendships at that time in your life - living away from your first family but having yet to start a new family, your friends become your family. Toby, who has recently become interested in the idea of co-housing, would probably argue that it has to do with the proximity to friends and the way the physical structure of college is set up to form a strong community, and I think that's true too. Little did I know what a blessing it would be as I sat horrified in the back of my parents car as we drove well past the main campus of Boston College to a crappy little dorm the college had rented miles away to accommodate for an overflow of students, but living far off campus that year with a small group of people was undoubtedly part of the reason I formed such strong friendships in college.

The wonderful thing about developing friendships in a community is that the community itself maintains your friendships. Perhaps in the post-Facebook era it's not as relevant, but in the years since college I may lose touch with one friend or another from time to time but I know that other friends are keeping in touch and therefor still feel somehow connected. When we see each other in person, this connection allows us to immediately fall back into place and pick up where we started, which is exactly what we did in Ventura on our post-New Year's weekend. We got to know each other's kids (and they each other, which was fun to see) and talked about work and parenting and schools (and this time schools meant preschools), but we all relate pretty much exactly as we did all those years ago.

I like to imagine that fifty years from now we'll still be renting houses to celebrate New Year's with friends from college. We'll probably replace Fat Tire with some sort of brandy and Metamucil combination. We will listen to dated music with our hearing aids turned up and play Bridge instead of Apples to Apples. And in the morning, the question will be: Who stayed up with arthritis pains last night?

Hopefully we will be able to look back on many years of get-togethers between now and then and realize that the laughter and our friendships, formed so long ago, remained constant throughout the years.