Kate Klimo and Buffy Shutt, the authors of Coming of Age… All Over Again, are hosting a brunch tomorrow at the Steinhardt Building for a casual discussion of their midlife guide for baby boomers. The following is a guest post written by them for the 92Y Blog.

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When good friends look back over the years, they see a scrapbook-like procession of hairstyles or hair tints, skirt lengths or waist lines, babies in Snuglis or kids in mortar boards. When we look back at our friendship, which began the very first day of freshman year at college, we have all of that, for sure. But we also have something else. We have talk. We have this long, rich, sometimes frayed but never entirely abandoned, tapestry of talk that stretches out between us from coast to coast, since for twenty years we have lived on opposite sides of the country. There is talk over restaurant tables, talk at kitchen tables, talk on beaches and lawn chairs, talk in letters and on telephones and cell phones and, lately, on the Blackberry, our thumbs busily twiddling, day after day after day, back and forth. Talking.

What is the talk about? It started out, when we were in college, talk about term papers and boy friends and, when we stayed up all night speeding on black coffee and smoking Tarryton’s, pondering the Meaning of Life. After we graduated, it was talk about husbands and childbirth, careers and promotions, getting the babies to sleep through the night, getting the kids into nursery school and, finally, through the SATs and into college.

It was a few years ago, when we hit our fifties, that the talk took a turn for the scary. There was parents falling ill, kids careening back toward the nest, loss of a job at 50, bank accounts groaning beneath the strain of supporting nearly grown children and a parent whose Social Security and pension checks couldn’t quite stretch to the end of each month. It was the kind of stuff that keeps you up at night; that gives you the whimwhams and the sweats, and we’re not talking hot flashes here (although we certainly could, if you’re interested.) It was out of this talk—the insights we developed, the research we did, the resources we put together, the exercises we came up with, the stories about ourselves we told each other--that COMING OF AGE…ALL OVER AGAIN was born. And because our talks covered the complete length and breadth and depth of our very busy lives our book became a many layered thing, about many things rather than about just one thing. Fond as we are of metaphors, we found ourselves adapting the cake as a metaphor for our lives. Why cake?

Because even when you follow the recipe, it’s not always easy to make it pretty, although God knows we try. Because our lives are complex and complicated. We like to embrace the many parts of us. Because a layer cake is beautiful and delicious and forever and always a symbol of or a cause for celebration.

One of the most important layers of this cake is friendship. You might say that we are evangelical on the subject of friendship and its importance in our lives as we hit 50 and discover that we are coming of age all over again. Studies show that having friends make you healthier and happy as you get older. Do you remember how important friends were at the start of our lives, in grade school and high school and college? Friends were everything in those days. How did it happen that, sometime in the last thirty or forty years, friendship became less important in our lives? We think it’s true that, for most of us, what with jobs and careers and kids and husbands and significant others of all stripes, friendship has lost importance. How do we bring friendship back into the center of our lives? How do we restore our friends to their rightful and infinitely useful place?

We think that a Tea Party is a good start.

Are we talking about little white gloves and clotted cream and gilt-edged calling cards? Nope. We’re talking about figuring out who your real friends are—the friends you want to call when something great happens and the friends you want to call when life’s coming apart at the seams. We’re talking about picking up the phone and calling the friend you’ve been meaning to call for the past ten years and are past embarrassed about contacting, but so what? We’re talking about getting together, one on one and in comfortable and safe groups, and talking about the serious and often scary stuff that is facing all of us boomers as we pass the halfway point of our lives. We’re talking about living our lives with an open heart and an open mind and an absolute willingness to try out new ideas, share stories, make a few mistakes and still feel, on occasion, like the geekiest kid in the class. Our lives are many-layered, take the time with your friends at the tea party to talk about each layer.

So it seems, after all these years, though we’ve long ago sworn off the Tarrytons and our black coffee is now milky tea, we are still sitting around talking, pondering the Meaning of Life. Won’t you join us?

White gloves not necessary.

[The Coming of Age… All Over Again Brunch: 1/23/07]