For years I have maintained that if I can keep out of doctors’ and lawyers’ offices my life will be fine. I am thinking of adding a third item to avoid: lunch with the girls.

Having lunch with the girls has always been one of my guilty little pleasures. It is like taking a mini vacation from reality. As a workingwoman before kids, on Fridays we could take a late lunch, sneak in a glass of wine and gossip away a good part of the afternoon. If we took our briefcases and separate cars, staggered our departure and return times, no one knew that we were goofing off.

Even with small children, I would make "play dates" for myself at the local fast food emporium. You could put the kids in the playground and enjoy a grease-ridden burger and fries while finding out why the mailman’s truck was always parked in front of Gertrude’s house for two hours every other Wednesday.

Finally, there were the mandatory celebration lunches on the first day of school, which were offset nine months later by the cry in our chardonnay lunches on the last day of school. 

I have always "done" lunch well – until last week. 

Lately, it has been harder to round up friends for a bite in the middle of the day. It took weeks of planning to find the right day, time and restaurant that would accommodate everyone’s dietary requirements and hectic schedule. It was necessary to postpone the event because Madge had to chaperone a regional cheerleading contest. Finally, the day came, and miraculously, we all arrived on time.
Sadie was breathless, having just come from her yoga and Pilates class, while Madge looked calm and composed even though she was renovating office space for her recession-proof skin and computer care, click and mortar business. (Her motto: Don’t let your software or the economy wear on your soft skin.)
But as we ordered our house salads, dressing on the side and water with a twist of lemon, the conversation took a strange turn. Sadie leaned toward the center of the table and exclaimed, "I just heard that Shirley had barnacles."

"What?!!" Madge and I exclaimed simultaneously. "How can you get barnacles in landlocked Colorado?"

"It’s a medical condition. Say, this salad is too dry. Are you going to use the rest of your Gorgonzola dressing? As for Shirley, she had these ‘funny, scaly thingies’ on her back and after checking it out on the web, she was sure she had a deadly tropical disease."

"No!" we both said again in between bites of goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes, which we had ordered as extras.

"She was so panicked she actually talked the dermatologist’s receptionist into forgoing the four month wait for an appointment and went in the next day. It turns out she has barnacles of maturity. I don’t know. I think I would rather have the deadly tropical disease," Sadie concluded.
"That’s nothing," exclaimed Madge. "Poor Karen just found out that she is suffering from menopot. Do you think they have a double fat, whipped latté with Kahlua? I always feel so cheated when all I have is a salad."

"So what’s she going to do about it?" I asked while trying not to seem concerned about my own post-menopausal Buddha belly.

"Well, according to her doctor, there’s only one solution and it doesn’t involve sit-ups."

"Liposuction!" we all quietly exclaimed.

"If she had been smart, she would have had that tummy tuck when she had all that other work done," Madge stated, with that all-knowing look of a professional.

I don’t know if it was the excess caffeine from the latté or the order of double fudge New England sin cake with three forks, but I suddenly found myself blurting out, "Julia experienced the click of death and it was all my fault."

The deafening silence was punctuated by the sound of dropping forks and gasping mouths.
"In this day and age," Marge harrumphed. "I told both of you that would happen if you didn’t buy the new Quickie disks. But noooo, you two had to keep using the old ones until she clicked and died. What did it wipe out?"

"Most of her hard drive, not to mention the Quickie drive and extraneous breakage."

"Extraneous breakage?" they queried as the last piece of torte disappeared.

"Yes, she jumped up to unplug her USB port to save the data base, tripped over the dog and took out a lamp and half her desk on the way down. She’ll be fine, but she said that last rites are needed for her computer’s drive. It was only a year old. She was thinking of burying it in the garden next to the dearly departed hamster, but she got a notice of a class action suit concerning constant Quickie disk clicking. She’s having her attorney review it even as we speak."

After this revelation, lunch quickly broke up. With a quick peck on the cheek, we all headed our separate ways. As I clicked the messages left on my cell phone through my radiation-free earpiece, it dawned on me that I had better make an appointment to get those scaly patches on my back looked at. And while I was at it, I might check with my lawyer, because I had given Julia the fatal disk that had caused the crash and extraneous breakage.

I know from my overloaded day timer that I could probably squeeze in a meeting with my attorney a week from next Thursday. And after that, how about lunch?