They turned out not to be lunatics

Well, they're kind of lunatics, but only the very best kind, a type of haute lunatic that you can't just find anywhere. I found them on the internet.

Karen (on the left) and Amy (stage right) are a couple of people I've known for about six years. I met them in an internet message board for Catholic moms and we'd all known each other for several months before we realized that we live very close to one another: Karen lives in my husband's hometown and goes to church at the parish where he used to ride his bike to play basketball and hide in fear from the very scary nuns as they made their quiet way from the school back to their little abbey when he was a boy. She lives just over an hour away from me and Amy; the two of us actually live very close indeed, just a hoot and a holler away, as my great-grandma would have said.

We've been trying to meet once a month to eat dinner together, but we trade a lot of emails back and forth and also "talk" frequently on that message board, of which we are all still members.

We laugh, we cry, we pray, we eat. We talk. And talk and talk and talk. And we love each other. We started out as virtual acquaintances and have been lucky enough to be able to translate that friendship IRL, as we say in internet parlance.