My last post was about my dad - a bit of a downer. Today is one year since my mom (step-mother) passed over and although I thought about writing about her, I think that could also end up being more melancholy than what I want to communicate today. Instead, I want to honor my oldest (not in age) friend, whose birthday was this past week.
It was the summer of 1960. My father, my two sisters and I were moving to the town where his business was located. He had rented us a large house with a wrap-around front porch and a roomy, fenced-in front yard for our collie dog. It was moving-in day when a tall, round woman with two little girls in tow appeared at the back door. I was five at the time, ready to start first grade in a month. The woman introduced herself as Clara and the dark-haired and brown-eyed girl hiding behind her leg as Debbie, her six-year-old daughter. The younger, blonde girl was a neighbor's daughter, Robin. Debbie and I watched each other with curiosity.Debbie, too, was starting first grade in the fall.
When Clara discovered that my mom was deceased and my step-mother and father were divorced, she was filled with motherly compassion for me. Debbie's big brown eyes got even larger as she tried to comprehend how the girl in front of her could live without a mother. In the weeks that followed, before school started, Clara often invited me to their house on the next street to play with Debbie, and sometimes Robin.
Perhaps, because I had no mom and was accustomed to going to a child-sitter's house while my father worked, starting school was not scary to me. But, for Debbie, that first day of school was terrifying. Her mother walked Debbie and me to the bus stop the first day. Debbie cried, but to ease her fear, I held her hand as we boarded the bus. Unfortunately, we were in different classrooms and Debbie had to face the rest of the day alone, but I was waiting outside her classroom door at the end of the day and we walked hand-in-hand to the bus together. That was the start of a friendship that has lasted almost 53 years.
Debbie and I only attended two years of school together. My father, one of my sisters and I moved to another state the summer after second grade. Even during our two school years together, our friendship waxed and waned as we made other friends, but my family's move was still tramatic for us. Unbelievably, those two third graders started writing letters to one another - letters that always started: Dear, Debbie or Becky, How are you? I am fine. And from there we shared our experiences in two different schools in two different states.
Every summer, and during some Christmas holidays, my father put me on a Greyhound bus to go visit Debbie. I loved those visits, especially the summer ones. I stayed two or three weeks. Debbie's mom showered me with the motherly love I was missing and Debbie and I and the always-changing foster children in their home spent hours playing in the summer sunshine. When we were older, Debbie faced her fears of leaving home and her mom and came to visit me a couple of times.
Debbie and I were not always close. We always stayed in touch, we always saw each other at least once a year, but sometimes we did not like each other very much. Debbie was living in the suburbs of a large city and I was growing up in a very rural area. Our experiences were completely different. As we reached our teens years, Debbie was hanging with friends that I thought were trouble. She was hiding things from her parents and I wanted no part of that. When I visited, Debbie often went out with her friends and I stayed home with her mom, picking vegetables from their garden, shelling peas and talking. Perhaps it was my relationship with her mom that kept our friendship intact during Debbie's adventurous teenage years, but, whatever was the glue that held our friendship together, I am eternally grateful that we did not drift apart as we often went our separate ways. I went to college, for awhile, and Debbie moved to another state and worked for her brother. I moved even further away - more than 800 miles. We both got married the same year. Through all the years and all the moves and all the changes, we kept writing letters, even when we could not visit one another.
Now we stay in contact with cell phones and emails and Facebook, but sadly, we rarely see one another. We have birthday dates - I call her on her birthday, as I did last week, and she calls me on mine. We drink a glass of wine and chat for more than an hour. As the years pass, our friendship deepens. We appreciate each other more with each birthday conversation. We know that a friendship that has lasted this long, especially from such a distance, is a gift to treasure.
We have supported one another through marital and family problems, births, deaths and adoptions, illnesses and accidents, happiness and heartache, and, although our life experiences have been completely different, we have always had understanding and compassion for one another's problems and we have celebrated one another's joys and triumphs. There is no one I laugh so heartily with than Debbie. There is no one I can so quickly reconnect with, even after months of no communi-cation, and feel as though we have been talking every day.
I wish we lived closer. I wish we could have a tea together at least once a week. I wish I could call her up and say, "Let's go shopping." I wish we could take long walks together and sort through the meaning of life. But, we can't. We have different lives a long distance apart. We have families and businesses and responsibilities that keep us where we are, restricting our ability to even visit. But, I know that in spite of all these challenges, our friendship endures because we are soul friends. Our friendship transcends our lives. It is deeper and stronger than our physical connection because it is a soul friendship and for that, and for Debbie, I will always be grateful.
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