... and relative dimension in space

[fox]

Dinner tonight with friends from college, who left five years ago and haven't been back since.  (She was my roommate senior year; they moved away when he began graduate school, and are back in town this weekend for her sister's wedding.)  Him, I actually haven't seen since another roommate's wedding in February of 2003, but because I see her just a little less than semiannually and because we're that close and because even with the year and a half in Charlottesville and the two years in England I really have more or less been here all this time, it was as if not one minute had passed, and it kept surprising me that they didn't recognize whole city blocks' worth of new construction that's gone up while they were away.