This is my friend Felicia. I first met her in 1976, and one of my earliest memories of the two of us is standing on our assigned numbers, painted on the blacktop atour junior high school, while Mrs. Calvello took roll. We were complaining to each other about our thighs. I’m guessing that self-critical awareness probably starts earlier now than seventh grade, which is terribly sad. Felicia and I were close enough in junior high that I spent one summer night at her house and her family freaked me out by making their own homemade ravioli, which until then I thought came only in a can with Chef Boyardee’s picture on it.

I dug up my old year books before having lunch with her on Sunday (see my haiku tribute to what we ate here) and we spent a good couple hours going through the old pictures full of big hair, Dittos pants, and polyester tops. We talked about people we knew then and people we’re still in touch with.

While Felicia went on to graduate at the high school we attended together our freshman year, I moved over the hill to Santa Cruz at the start of our sophomore year, so she has much more information than I do about some of the people I grew up with. It’s odd how moved I was upon hearing news that was new a decade or more ago — that this couple married, that person became a Hollywood producer, or that boy — the sidekick of the most popular kid in eighth grade who was nice to geeky me and I totally crushed on — died.

I joke about being old — I’ll be 48 in just under three weeks — but it really feels like a moment ago that I was Allan Jaffe’s Little Sister (no name necessary), allowed by brotherly fiat to sit at Senior Bench for lunch with hunks from the swim team like Tom Pohlman. It didn’t help my perception of time’s passage that Felicia looks exactly the same as she did 30-odd years ago. I tried to take a picture of her ninth grade yearbook photo to put next to the picture above as proof, but on a smart phone, I couldn’t get close enough. Trust me. She looks the same.

Remember when we were young how long 15 minutes could seem? It seems unfair how snappy decades fly by when I’m old enough to understand why the rush isn’t something thrilling. I have my kindergarten class picture posted on my fridge. I don’t know what happened to all the kids in that picture. I can’t even name them all, despite thinking at the time that there was no way I would ever forget them. But I wonder how many of them I’d recognize, how many would recognize me, and whether after all these years, we’d think, on the whole, that we lived up to the potential we had that fall day in 1969 when the picture was taken.

That’s the thing about running into old friends who knew you when: you start thinking about how your life measures up now to what you thought it would be. I always wanted to be a writer, and I do make a living doing that. But I don’t get paid for the writing I want to do, but rather for the writing others want me to do.

Maybe teenage me would be a little disappointed at the lack of a summer home, the aversion to really high heels and the daily tedium of wearing makeup. The young me would think that my time was running out, that it is too late for e a second — or third — act. The old me knows better. Time flies, but for now I can still fly fast enough to keep up.