Friend speak

Years ago I had this conversation with a friend.

Me: Esther called today.

Her: Semi colon or colon?

Me: Colon.

Of course no one else would have understood that Esther was a board member who regularly found fault with my punctuation not to mention the fact that any two-page direct mail letter I sent never had a full sentence ending on the first page, a trick to encourage people to turn the page over. I'm sure if Esther were alive today, she would find a typo in each of my novels and call me to tell me about it.

We knew what we meant because we were friends and could speak in shorthand based on shared experience.

Thus when my housemate talked about a blackberry moment, I knew she wasn't speaking about the taste but the time that I not only dropped them, they flew over my head and although I thought I'd gotten them all, we were finding blackberries in strange places for days.

And speech can be as multi-lingual as faux amies in French/English. Blackberry moments for my late friend Mardy and me would mean a moment of soul searching, based on a walk we'd taken at her parents' Maine cabin where we'd walked in the woods, shared our deepest hopes and fears while eating blackberries not a spilled something.

"Utterly ridiculous?" is a trigger for another friend and I to make plans to do something fun. The term came from her then boyfriend who thought our plans to ride each of the Geneva buses from end to end for a day, hoping on and off to have a coffee or investigate at will was utterly ridiculous. Now that he is an ex I'm wondering what he would have termed the time we took the sheep herding course?

I wonder if I said to my housemate that that I was doing a local postmaster trick, she would pick up that it was something obsessive compulsive. The thought crossed my mind when I arranged the file cards on my desk neatly.

After all friend speak vocabularies enlarge with time, so I'll try either doing a Daniel (the postmaster's name) or doing a postmaster later today. Just for the hell of it.