Once Upon a Time

My friend of forty years laughed and said “Did you ever think 35 years ago that we’d be talking about who has the Alzheimer’s gene?” to which I answered, “No, we were always talking about sex,” which was true because we spent a fair amount of time behaving badly and then lamenting with each other before and after swimming very early morning laps in a cold pool where we went religiously but pointlessly, it all being part of her plan for us to avoid aging, a condition so abstract and far away as to be part of a fairy tale we only partly believed.