My BFF

The end of this extreme winter is nearly over. Although the drifts are still massive threatening blankets of frozen water ready to unleash floods into basements and fill internment streams to overflowing, I am heartened by the prospect of SPRING. Fat robins appear out of nowhere reminding me that spring – that season of hope and promise – will arrive. And hope is so important.

I have a friend who loves spring with a passion that is infectious. Her homes have always been decorated with crocus and daffodil bulbs blooming in crockery bowls set on deep windowsills. Her kitchens would be fragrant with Easter cakes and she would don lightweight clothing with the delight of a little girl in a new party dress. My friend is joyful from the inside out. She is also brave.

This dear lady recently received horrifying news. Stage IV lung cancer will be her fate. Three weeks before winter storm Juno, a routine trip to the doctor’s office with a complaint that allergies were troubling her sleep turned out to be something much more terrifying. Subsequent testing confirmed the worst. Cancer had invaded much more than her lungs. Medical intervention will be conservative, primarily palliative.

We’ve known each other since high school, although we weren’t yet friends in those days. She was a year ahead of me, thus making friendship impossible – I not being on an equal footing with her elevated status as an ‘upper classman.’ We are from the same tiny village, so we knew of each other by name recognition, if nothing else.

One day, as I was sitting in senior-level bookkeeping class (aka Accounting II) where Mr. White (yes, the former selectman of Mattapoisett) was extoling upon us the virtues of neat and balanced lines of numbers on 22-column ledger pages, in strolled the tall and willowy Ms. S (withholding her name to protect her privacy). I was thunder-struck, for she looked like a model walking out of the pages of Seventeen Magazine.

Standing before the class in her crocheted mini-dress sporting a ‘mod’ haircut and radiating a self-assurance none of us had achieved, a moment frozen in my memory, she was everything the rest of us aspired to become.

Physically beautiful, tall and slender, cheerful and delightfully unabsorbed, she stood before the class at Mr. White’s insistence and told us about her exciting position with the Cape Cod Times in the advertising department. It sounded like an impossible dream to young females still realizing ‘yes, we can’ really did mean us.

In 1968, a few girls from our school were striking out beyond our small town boundaries. Some were even going to college, while the rest of us were stuck in 1955 thinking about finding a breadwinner so we could settle down and raise a family. But here stood Ms. S, coifed and groomed to stylized perfection, telling us about a bigger world out there beyond our imagination.

Mr. White was so proud of his protégé he could barely contain himself. After Ms. S had filled in the details of her exciting career in advertising, Mr. White said we, too, could do the same thing if we tried hard. Teenage angst and self-doubt pinched off any hope I might have had that day. Oh, how youth is wasted on the young.

As it turned out a few years later, we ended up being neighbors – working together, commuting together, hanging out together, and supporting each other through good times and bad. In a word, ‘friends.’

More years passed and she moved to California after divorcing. I took a side trip to Italy and a divorce before I, too, moved to California where Ms. S and I reconnected.

She was lovely as always and kind. Whenever she visited my home, she never failed to bring some sort of treat for my young son, and her upbeat familiar presence was often the dose of happiness I needed to survive the dramas of my young life.

I think it was Christmas 1978 when she came to visit us in that tiny duplex in Long Beach. We had a Christmas tree that could have been the inspiration for Charles Schulz. My son’s school librarian had donated it to us. Using his little red wagon, we hauled the homely tree into the house.

When Ms. S came to visit, she noted that the tree was decorated with paper chains and nothing more. She insisted on taking us shopping for decorations. By the time we were finished putting the new ornaments on the tree, it had gone through a metamorphosis. It was resplendent. Her face glowed with pleasure as she held my little boy on her lap. My appreciation for her act of generosity has spanned the decades. Ms. S no longer remembers that event. That’s all right, I do.

We lost touch for a while when I returned to the east coast. She remained on the west coast for decades, only returning east when her parents’ health and age got the best of them. She wanted and needed to be close to family. Time was becoming a thing with limits.

Reconnecting shortly thereafter, we returned to being loving supportive mates. We’ve enjoyed years of yard sales, lunches, glasses of wine, backyard barbecues, and road trips. She is the sister I had always longed for, the friend to whom I could always count on to confess to without fear of judgment, and the pal I could laugh with until our bellies hurt.

Today, we’ll chat on the phone about the plot twists on “Downton Abbey.” She’ll tell me about the latest sagas at her senior apartment complex, and about the cancer. I’ll withhold any trivia going on in my household, with the exception of stuff that is humorous because I love to hear her laugh. Her laughter is all that matters now.

I’m going to buy her paper whites and crocus bulbs and put them in a thick pottery bowl lined with stones from the beach and take them to her. Their blossoms will remind her she is loved. We’ll go for a ride in my new car. We’ll have lunch, talk, touch, and maybe even giggle. We’ll be girls again if but for a moment, a moment where time is meaningless, a moment when I had a best friend forever.

By Marilou Newell