I’m just going to go ahead and rip the band-aid right off. No teasing around the edges with a slow pull. One quick yank, hair and all. Here it goes.

I have friends who are girls. And I had dinner with a half-dozen of them all at one time last weekend.

Whew! I feel so much better.

I tried explaining this to some of my church friends over lunch on Sunday, which led to a round of taunts and chuckles as the tacos and burritos were passed. Now, admittedly, I set myself up by trying to explain myself before I even made the comment.

“Okay. I’ve got something to tell you and I don’t want you to jump to any conclusions.”

That was a mistake.

The response: “Well, it doesn’t matter what you say now, cause you’re already in trouble before you even get it out. So, out with it.”

The back story first.

When you get to be a widower my age, you suddenly discover all the people who completely understand what you’re going through. I lost my spouse. They’ve lost a spouse. You have a lot in common. The conversation flows almost without effort. It’s like this huge network of support that I never knew existed.

In the early months of widower-hood, I had a number of people advise me to go see a counselor. “It’ll do you some good,” they’d say. But the truth is, all I had to do is stumble up on other people with similar experiences and I had automatic therapy. Free of charge.

People just seemed to show up in my life from unexpected places. Old college professors. Friends in town. People in my church whom I’ve known through their own season of grief. It proved to be one of the God-nods in life that enabled me to cope and refresh and learn and grow through that period of life.

Two of those people were classmates of mine from high school. HCHS class of ’74. Jan had married her high school sweetheart and remained close to home. Donna had moved on from graduation to who knows where. Which is how it is with nearly all of us from those days. We move on. We build a life somewhere and we lose track of each other.

I made the 5-year and 10-year reunions. To the best of my memory, we were all pretty much preoccupied with ourselves and we were comparing notes on what we were doing. Meeting wives and husbands that we didn’t know. It was fun and awkward at the same time.

I didn’t go to another reunion until about 15 years ago. It was a lot better than what I remember from the early ones. It was more like old friends reconnecting. Name tags were not only a good idea, they were totally necessary. We weren’t comparing notes about what we had done with our lives. We were a lot more interested in where life had taken us.

We had our 45th reunion several years ago, and that’s where I connected the dots with Donna again. She was (is) living in Columbus, which is basically home to me even though I live and work 30 minutes north of there in Harris County. I didn’t know it then, but she had lost her husband several years earlier.

I lose track of time, but when Jan lost her husband, I went to the visitation. We were both from the same town and the same church. We hadn’t been extremely close, but I knew I had to go. I was friends with both her and her husband.

Well, when Beth died, these two gals reached out to me. Jan drove all the way to Columbus and the three of us had supper. I wasn’t sure if I was up for it or not, but they insisted. We must have tied up our table at the restaurant for over two hours. I listened to their stories. They listened to mine. I was a part of a club that they understood, and I appreciated what that meant.

Fast forward almost two years.

Donna texted me and suggested that the three of us get together again.

“You’re about to retire. We’ll wait until you get past that, then we can get together at my house for supper. I’ll grill out some steaks and we can catch up.”

It sounded good to me. I agreed.

Toward the end of last week, I called Donna to get her address. I had a vague idea of what part of town she lived in, but I had never been to her place.

“It’s gonna be just me, you and Jan, right?” I honestly don’t know why I asked that, but it seemed like an innocent enough question.

There was a long pause. “You weren’t supposed to ask that,” she said.

I dropped it, but I knew something was up. Through the miracle of Facebook, I know that these two have a pretty tight circle of girlfriends from our old high school days. They travel together. They go to concerts together. They will find almost any excuse to do about anything together. And I knew that some of this core group is working together to plan our 50th HCHS Reunion for next June.

On the appointed day, last Saturday, I spent the bulk of the day hanging out with my granddaughters at their home while mom and dad had a day-date. This is part of the retired grandpa’s duty and privilege. Besides, my daughter’s house is not far from the address I had for supper.

On the way to Donna’s house, I got a call from her. She wanted me to stop and pick up a bag of ice. I was glad to do it, but being the sharp old guy that I am, I began to wonder why three people would need an entire bag of ice. Maybe her freezer is on the blink. Maybe, just maybe, there’s more to this simple invite than meets the eye.

Let me just summarize the rest. There were six gals from my high school there that night. They came into the room one by one grinning like the cat that got the mouse. And I was the mouse. One of them had made a chocolate retirement cake for me that looked like a tree stump with little pretzel trees on top.

For over three hours we sat around the dinning room table and talked like old friends. One of them since first grade. All of them since we were freshmen. Disconnected by time and circumstances. Connected by memories that span that distance. Some of us widowed. Some not. All of us with stories to tell that filled in the gaps over the last 50 years.

I told them, “It’s kind of scary to be the only guy at this table, but I’m grateful you invited me to be here tonight.”

So, yep, I had dinner with six women who happen to be from another time when we had no idea what life would bring.

They are still the girls I remember. And we are, I imagine, friends forever.

For Donna, Jan, Karen, Norene, Brenda and Martha. Thank you.