Day 31: Old Friend

An old friend, not as in old (because she won't turn 50 until a week after me) but as in long-time. I first laid eyes on her in fifth grade when I transferred to her elementary school. I thought she was just about the coolest person I'd ever seen, but she didn't notice me. In middle school she still stood out from the crowd in her midi-length fringed vest. My mother would never have bought me something so impractical, so groovy. I wore Danskin striped tops and matching pants with desert boots.

In ninth grade we were in the same biology class and we became lab partners. Our friendship evolved while looking at slides and pricking our fingers to determine our blood types and mooning over all the cute tenth grade boys. We became best friends, a friendship that remained intact even as we made other friends and hung out with different groups of people. It wasn't always an easy friendship -- we were very different people in a lot of ways and we were immature and often hurt one another -- but it endured.

College split us up for a while, but after visiting me several times at Hamilton she decided to transfer there. I felt as though my space had been invaded. I worked hard to create a life for myself there and she just blew in and blew everyone away. I was jealous, and I was hurt that she didn't need me.

We've kept in touch sporadically in the years since graduation. Her mom still lives here in town, and she herself has lived here for periods of time, travelled, lived elsewhere and come home again. She's a vagabond, a free spirit, an adventurer, still blowing in and blowing out. Always questioning. Always challenging herself and those around her. I wish I was a bit more like her. She has worked much harder at staying in touch than I have; I often push her away. What's that all about? She demands a kind of energy and a kind of involvement that I had decided I just didn't have enough of anymore. I'd thought that this was a friendship I'd always look back upon fondly, but one that had run its course.

So I was unprepared for the hug that we shared when she walked back into my life this afternoon, the one that I wished would never end, tears streaming down both of our cheeks, our slightly puzzled children looking on. Yes, she prods me and asks hard questions -- she doesn't mind getting dirty -- and yes, she leaves me in the dust; although we may have matured, we still manage to hurt one another. But we forged something all those years ago over the study of photosynthesis and the dissection of frogs that won't be broken, no matter the distance, no matter the years, no matter the misunderstandings.

So now here we are, come perhaps not full circle but certainly much of the way around. Time to forge a new kind of friendship, one based on a lifetime of disappointment and anger and pride and laughter. And maybe, just maybe, we're finally mature enough, now that we are, for all intents and purposes, 50, to recognize that we are who we are, and that that's precisely the reason we've loved one another all these years.

She's a middle-aged, dear old friend. Fair dinkum.