Best Friends Are the Best!

Last week, I had a happy accident. I was trying to call my husband’s doctor, and my phone had ideas of its own. It called my best friend from high school.

There’s a long list of names on my phone between Dr. and Marcy, nine letters worth of names, so there’s no way I dialed it myself.

As her phone began to ring, I quickly hung up to call my husband’s doctor. We were on our way there and I needed to confirm some stuff.

Marcy and I played phone tag after that, but eventually got to talk. We hadn’t talked–like talk-talked–in a very long while.

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Flashback: we met in Mr. Bucella’s ninth grade Science class and immediately hit it off–two peas in a pod.

We got our first real job together working at the local nursing home in the kitchen. We were ‘old folks home’ waitresses and loved our patients.

We did the dishes and laughed and joked and our shift was over before we knew it.

We used to visit patients on our break, usually Mrs. Webb and Mrs. Cherry.

We used to joke that when we got old, we’d go to the same nursing home as each other and terrorize the staff just for fun!

We also worked one summer for her brother-in-law cutting grass (he owned a nursery). I remember us mowing in our shorts and tank tops with our clunky steel toed boots and crew socks.

We rode our bikes–Italian ten speeds that we bought at the bike shop on Main Street with our own money we earned from the nursing home job–to her mom’s house once. I think it was a good fifty miles away. I loved her mom, she was a sweet and loving woman.

Her mother passed away while we were still in high school. After the tears and the hugs and the funeral, I told my friend that she could borrow my mom any time she needed to.

The summer after high school, we took our bikes apart, crated them so we could carry them on the bus to Plattsburg, NY, and once there, spent a night with some friends of her family.

The next day, we reassembled our bikes and rode them to the ferry that crosses Lake Champlain to Vermont. We rode to the house of friends of my family and stayed there a week.

That fall, when she couldn’t make it to a football game with her boyfriend and his family (I’m talking Buffalo Bills vs. the Oakland Raiders), she asked me to go in her place. By the way, it was an awesome game and Buffalo won by a point!

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Marcy gifted me two of the books that mean the most to me: a Bible of my very own and a book called Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus.

The first book is about how to live a righteous life, about love for God and for others, the history of man and God–where we’ve been and where we’re going.

The second book is about listening to the voice of authenticity that lives deep within you and following your own path to who you were born to be.

Two fine books to base a life on.

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This one event, more than any other, shows the depth of our friendship: when Marcy was getting married, she asked me to be her Matron of Honor knowing full well that I would be eight months pregnant on her wedding day. That’s the love of a very good friend.

I was honored that she asked me, but I felt her wedding should be about her–a hugely pregnant body front and center would be a distraction at the very least and could possibly totally eclipse the day if the child came early. I declined. That too is the love of a very good friend.

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We ended up living far away from each other. I live in Georgia and she lives in central New York. Several times when I would be home visiting, she’d make a special trip home to see me.

A couple times after my oldest was born (I was living with my parents while my husband was stationed in Hawaii and his ship was going out on a Pacific cruise) I drove up to visit her once with my son and once without.

When she and her husband were going to Florida one year, they stopped at our house for a bit.

We’ve kept up here and there, but once it got busy with kids and jobs and just living life it always seemed like the pauses got longer and the phone calls less frequent. Life often does that.

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So here we are, both in our sixties, enjoying the beginning of our golden years. And through some kind of divine intervention, we end up on the phone talking and laughing.

I’m sixteen again (but I know more things…). I’m laughing like I haven’t a care in the world. It’s like no time has passed since the last time we were together.

When I get off the phone because the coffeecake I was baking has been in the oven much longer than it should have been–like thirty minutes longer–I laugh and think how awesome was that to hear her voice on a random Tuesday afternoon.

I realize that the time we spent together in our youth, the person that she was (and is), all we laughed about and cried about together, all the questions and answers, the secrets, the lessons learned, all the happy and sad, is so much a part of who I am today and the perspective I hold on life and love, that I believe, had we not met, I’d surely be the poorer for it.

Even though time has often slipped away between us, Marcy will always be very special to me. We grew up through our teenage years together, spent the night at each other’s houses, worked together, held each other’s hopes and dreams, secrets and hurts, failures and triumphs just as we’ve held each other in our hearts all these years.

I promise it won’t be so long next time.