Posted on: Tuesday, December 14, 2004

ABOUT WOMEN
Lamenting as guy pals grow up

By Christine Strobel
Advertiser Columnist

My male friends are growing up. It's a calamity.

For me, guy friends are a refuge of juvenile antics amid the sober business of being an adult in the world — stupid human tricks usually involving beer, random quotes from Ben Stiller movies and tantrum-throwing over toy deprivation (retractable DVD players for their SUVs and other such necessities).

It seems, after a whirlwind of trips last month, they've gotten so serious.

In Europe, I saw my friend Scott, whom I hadn't seen since graduation 10 years ago. (Ten years! That's a mind scramble. If the average human life span is 80 years, and the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, then the last time I saw Scott, the Himalayas were forming and the landscape was dotted with woolly mammoths.)

Scott hadn't changed much — still rowdy, same devil's twinkle in his eye and gift for exaggeration ("Strobel made me walk FIVE-HUNDRED MILES all over Amsterdam," he whined to our friend James, another buddy in Europe).

But then he'd regale us with stories from Iraq as the Mideast bureau chief for Stars & Stripes, about tracer fire whizzing over his Green Zone hotel in Baghdad, a rocket-propelled grenade hitting his bus, or the sensation of cooling off under the choppers that beat down air like hair dryers.

Wherever American troops are posted in the Middle East, he's there to get their story. He marshals reporters in and out of war zones — in short, a serious job. He flew to Baghdad for another assignment the day I left.

And James, who helped me close out bars in every metropolis around the country? He published a book (on the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, no less), got a law degree and married a siren who has a no-nonsense posting with the State Department in Luxembourg — that couple will change the world.

Then, a week after returning to the states, my friend Craig got married.

He was delirious with joy. The guy I yelled myself hoarse with at four dozen UCLA football games, who orchestrated the exquisite nightmare that was my 21st birthday, was actually tearful about becoming Mr. Family Man. And I know he'll excel at it — he's got so much love in his heart.

I recognize what's happening is natural. And I'm super proud of these guys. I always knew they'd do big, serious things.

But it still creeps me out a bit, this tsunami of maturity. It forces me to reflect: Where did the time go? And its corollary: Why does it have to?

James later put me on a train and said how great it was "hanging out on the older side of adulthood."

It was like a bomb. I instantly protested, "Don't say that! We're MILES from adulthood."

I'm digging in my heels. Somebody has to.

Reach Christine Strobel at cstrobel@honoluluadvertiser.com.