Happy Birthday Friend

When does a friendship begin? Sometimes the moment is sharply clear, like a thunderbolt or a shooting star. Sometimes the beginning is more muted, like the fading of dark to light as the sun rises on a new day. And when you look back twenty-five years later, you can’t even see where it began.

It’s like that with my Nora; I can’t put my finger on the where or why of how this all started. Somewhere in grade school obviously, within a flurry of blue plaid skirts and basketball games. There were the talks about boys on our bus and the endless recess games. And always the homework, the minutiae of the school days, the milk cartons and the gym classes. And somehow the magic of fashioning from those ingredients a friendship that is not dependent on earthly measurements of time and distance, but something more real; a true paradox.

We have not been in the same school or even the same town practically since we were fourteen. I laugh when I think of how we had it all figured out then and we knew exactly how we were going to change the world. Time changes so much in people and their circumstances. We have been through grad school, marriages, babies, jobs, and more. Many big and small moments have been spent without the other. We don’t talk on the phone all that much, and we don’t always recognize birthdays either. We always remember, but sometimes life gets in the way. Still, the magic happens and when we pick up the phone or see each other we are right where we left off.

She is the one who moved away, but we beckon her back, her family and I. I have adopted her family too, and I walk in the back door these days without even knocking. They don’t really need another child; she is the youngest of nine. But there is comfort in seeing her Dad the judge reading his paper at the table, the only Dad we have left between us now. And her Mother is a saint I’ve had the pleasure of meeting in real life; her calm and sturdy ways are infectious.

Breakfast is our thing, a few hours to drink coffee by ourselves and deal with the big questions. These days we don’t have ANY answers. We muddle through together somehow, these problems that don’t come with an instruction manual. She knows I love her, my Nora. But I don’t tell her often enough. She is my beacon when my boat is pitching in the seas. Lately my skiff has lost a sail and sprung a leak, but she is always ready with a life jacket and a buoy. No, I cannot pinpoint the moment that this started, but I can’t imagine this tumultuous world without her. And when the hushed hues of the sun setting in the sky come to end another day, I know that she is working hard to live her best life, just as she expects of me.