Sweet Dreams, With a Little Help From Friends

I recently celebrated my 45th birthday. I got myself a facial and a couple of coveted presents: a dramatic red wool cape and a cotton hat that fit my larger-than-average head. I took the ritual $20 that I get from my mother every birthday and treated myself to a book. But my favorite present was the slumber party I threw for myself.

When I was growing up, it was not in our family tradition to invite extra children over to further crowd the bedrooms and eat their adolescent weight in food that couldn’t be spared. Four daughters and two sons, with everybody sharing a bedroom, was already asking too much of our house. I didn’t attend many pajama parties, either. The parents of the kids in my working-class neighborhood probably shared my parents’ reluctance to open the upper floor of row houses only politely describable as modest to the inquiring eyes of the neighbor kids.

So the notion of throwing myself a slumber party engaged me. I was delighted to find the perfect corny invitations, shaped like sleeping bags. I dived into planning and preparing foods that had long been off limits for my cholesterol- and calorie-conscious guest list of similarly mature women. My board game collection was at the ready, and I had two throwaway cameras set out like hors d’oeuvres.

These friends of mine got into the spirit of a sleepover with amazing ease. Some of them confessed to not having had sleepovers as teenagers either. That could explain their adult willingness to wear their favorite pajamas and goofy cone party hats. Jeannie and I practiced dancing the bop and the two-step while Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell crooned. Sheila and Carol found common ground in the fact that they both ski and run their own businesses. Dorothy and Carol and Kai talked about rekindling the fire of old dreams, dealing with incomprehensible teenagers and writing fiction. Since it was my party, I made them watch “West Side Story.” We didn’t put anybody’s brassiere in the freezer or make prank calls to randomly chosen phone numbers. Nobody’s toenails got painted black while they slept. None of us even managed to stay up all night.

We are not a “Waiting to Exhale” pastiche of African American women in search of the love of a good man. Carol is Kai’s dentist; Dorothy was once best friends with Kai’s younger sister; Jeannie and Carol are sisters. At different times, Jeannie, Kai and I lived on the same street. Our children attended the same schools. We practice law, write, nurse the infirm, love our work and our families but look for quiet moments to ourselves, away from the din of lives that sometimes ask too much.

The joy of my first sleepover was underscored by one small lesson I learned over the course of my 45th year. In the flurry of moving from Los Angeles and making Oakland home again, I had a list of people to call to meet for dinner or coffee. The day I had marked to call her, Trina lost a valiant battle with cancer. She had been a mentor and an ally; I had imagined that there would be time to become friends. Trina was four days shy of her 48th birthday. Her death was an elemental reminder of how short is the walk from the cradle to the grave. It ratcheted up my conviction to be appreciative of the moment I am in.

So after eating all the forbidden foods and tipping the pseudo-grog pot over for the dregs, we lay in the semi-darkness, cocooned in quilts on the sofa, on a bed constructed of chairs pushed together, on a pallet of pillows on the floor. There were beds we could have retreated to, but then we wouldn’t have been together lit by the glow of the fireplace, listening to the wind howl and watching the eucalyptus trees dance outside my living room windows, talking until the last of us drifted off to sleep.