Prompt: who is your coven?

Every time I see the word, coven, I think of this spoof movie my husband A and I saw with the same title.  The characters were from somewhere near the Canadian border, so they pronounced it, "cooven", which A and I thought was hilarious.  Whenever we're in the midst of any situation fraught with tension, we look at each other and one of us can just quietly utter the word, "cooven" and we both start laughing.

I suppose having seen that movie together when it premiered is a kind of shorthand for how long we've known each other, but the truth is, we met in high school about a dozen years before cooven entered our lexicon.

Who are my oldest friends?  I was thinking about this the other day, about how chance has so much to do with circumstance.  How we meet other people and whether or not they become our friends is such a random equation.

On the last day of July in 1981, A's friend Allistair invited him to go to a party and, because A was at loose ends that night, he said yes, he'd go, even though he didn't know the guy throwing the thing or anyone who might be there.  Oren, whose party it was, had told me it was in honor of my moving away to the other side of the country later that summer.  Much later I found out he also told Allistair it was for him because Allister was headed to Switzerland in a few weeks.  If I had not been going west and A had not been at loose ends and Allistair wasn't expected overseas, we'd never have met that night.  It's the chance of confluence, this life. Who you meet, when and where you meet. And if the "heady" mixing of the minds is that perfect recipe for staying power, for forging that mysterious tenuous bond of friendship it can last a lifetime or a summer or just one night.

Post Script: If I hadn't met Denise by chance in line at the Delta of Venus over a decade ago on a break from the chaos of the Whole Earth Festival, I wouldn't be with you writing, right here, right now.