The fate of friendship

One of my closest friends from college found me after a fifteen year lapse.   She was always a packrat, the person in our college conservatory program that took all the pictures and saved all our theatre playbills.  She remembers everything, perhaps because of her diligent documentation. 

 

While sorting through some old stuff, she found the last letter I wrote to her from Seattle dated 1993, and felt a renewed drive to find me.   She had searched for me over the years, as I did her, but we didn’t know each other’s married names.   Luckily, she’s a clever researcher and tried enough types of searches via Google to find an article published in a Seattle newspaper in 2002 about my original play “My Lady’s Hand”.  

 

Here’s where it gets strange. 

 

She moved from the Bay area to Seattle in 2000.  She’s lived ten minutes from me for the last four years.   Like a movie where they track the missteps and missed encounters of two fated characters, we’ve probably almost run in to each other hundreds of times.  We have daughters born a month apart, techie husbands, and careers in high tech – she built a career in marketing the same time I built one in human resources.

 

That’s all crazy but the real marvel of it all is that from the minute I saw her email and responded with “Call me immediately,” it is as if no time has passed.   She’s the same, only better - having matured from the college kid she was, into this intelligent, beautiful, caring, interesting woman.  

 

I’m sure some would accuse me of sentimentality or at best a naive belief in fate, God and the mysteries of the universe, but I believe we’ve found each other again for a reason.  Beyond just that it’s fun to see her again because she makes me laugh, hard, but because she knows me on a deep level, in that way people from your youth do. 

 

She knew me before I learned to polish things up from the outside in, and all those tricks we develop to protect ourselves in this rough world.  She knows the real me, the vulnerable girl who went to a rich kid’s college on a grant, government loans, the sacrifice of my parents, and my grandmother’s help.  She knew me, and loved me, back when I didn’t have enough money for decent clothes and worried about rent and when I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror at dance class because of how fat I felt in my ballet leotard next to all the beautiful people. 

 

My husband asked me before she came for dinner last month what she was like and I said, “She’s clever, beautiful, kind of quirky and the type of friend that if I called after not being in touch for twenty years and said, ‘I’m sick’, or ‘I’m broke’, or ‘My husband just left me,’ she would run to me without hesitation, scoop in and help me start again.”  

 

She’s the essence of what it means to be ‘friends’.

 

I have regret we let so much time lapse before finding each other again.  But on the other hand, I’m so much more grateful because I feel keenly what I missed and I will hold that much tighter this time around.

Comments

[Katherine]

So if you blog posts make me cry...should I get a whole case of Kleenex from Costco before I read your book? ;) I don't have your way with words...so I will just go with "ditto".