In our neighborhood, Fridays are sacred. Friday nights mean Fuquay Bengals football games and complicated scenarios of who is going where afterward, who is picking up whom and who is sleeping over where. Friday nights mean adults together with friends and no one going any farther than one can go on a golf cart. Nothing is planned, but we all plan on it.

Last Friday we ended up at Karen’s house. The kids swam, played outside and then retired to Rock Band and Wii games they could bicker over. It was in some ways a typical Friday night and in some ways a magical evening.

We sat around on her screened porch with an eye on the Weather Channel. Hurricane stories were shared. Amongst us we had memories of Andrew, Hugo, Katrina and especially, Fran. We talked about the huge hurricane that nearly wiped out Galveston. I read a book about it, so I was full of fractured information. I declared that it was in 1903. John, you were right. I looked it up and it was 1900. Someone asked what it was named and I smugly answered that we didn’t name hurricanes then.

The table was cluttered with remnants of pizza, bottles of wine in varying stages of emptiness, beer cans, and ash trays. Although there were only eight chairs, the dozen or so people there kind of wound in and out from the screened porch to the deck and back.

As the evening progressed, the TV volume went down and the iPods came out. The ages represented ranged from 32 to 57 so there was much hilarity about songs “we” remember that the young’uns had never heard of. Two friends became an ad hock percussion group using only their hands, their rings, the table and the wrought-iron chair arms. As the girls started playing, the guys migrated downstairs to the makeshift hockey rink in the basement.

A few departed, needing to get children to bed, leaving three of us girls. One’s husband came back, saying, “Come on, you have to see this. It only happens once a month.” So we grabbed our wineglasses and migrated down to the lake where Karen conveniently had some very comfy Adirondack chairs. And for an hour or so, we just looked at the moon and its reflection on the lake and talked quietly amongst ourselves. It was magical.

The magic of the moon made me reflect on the magic of our lives. We are fortunate to have the friends we have. The younger ones can listen to those of us with teens and get an idea of what to look forward to. The older ones can share the wisdom from what we experienced when our kids were little. We can talk about completely grown-up subjects and let fly with the occasional (OK, constant) four letter word when the kids are otherwise occupied. We can drink each other’s wine, knowing that it will all come out even eventually. The magic is in these moments. Sometimes we are laughing too hard, singing too loud or playing drums on a table, so we can’t hear it. But I promise you, the magic is there as we connect with each other, support each other, sustain each other, sing with each other and make each other laugh.

And we came up with a hypothesis that if we found ourselves with some kind of dementia, we would likely STILL know EVERY. SINGLE. WORD. Of American Pie, but might struggle with the names of our kids. A dark thought…but in the magic of that full-moon night it was totally appropriate and totally hysterical.

Diane appears every Saturday on TriangleMom2Mom. Read more about Di at her blog Live and Let Di.