half-hearted

As a kid, I can remember spying one of those best friend necklaces, a jagged half-heart of silver, gleaming on the neck of one of the girls I so badly wanted to be.  Secretly, I wondered which of the other “in” girls had the other half. But, was I really missing out on anything?  It seemed like one of them was on the “outs” almost every other week.  Maybe they played “musical necklaces” to hand it off to the next honoree.  I decided early on to sit that game out.

I’ve just never been the type of person to have one best friend.  If I’m totally honest, it’s partly because I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, although at last glance, there wasn’t a long line of potential candidates at the door.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned along the way, it’s that people come and go from your life, but never without a reason.  Sometimes it’s just to clean the air ducts, but most of the time they leave something that matters, not just their sunglasses.  Picking a best friend is like trying to pick a favorite color.  Yep.  Never had one of those either.  But I got both in Vickie.

She overflowed into my life by accident and took up residence in my “everything” for three brief years.  Vickie told me my toes were fat, my children were edible, and that my hair looked best short.  She encouraged me to move beyond motherhood and write, to get in an airplane (with her) (without my 8-month old), and to buy new jeans before I reached my goal weight.  She taught me to forgive the unforgivable, to love myself in the process, and to just do “the next thing”.

And, all of this from her chair in the chemo clinic.  I willingly deployed to take her, when the cancer came back, the cancer that knew her before I did.  Suddenly, it seemed as if some third-wheel got in our way, ruining lunch dates and shopping adventures.  Vickie thought she had dodged her once, but, evidently, had been too kind a hostess.  Uninvited, she joined our duo and made us a trio.  And, she was there to stay.

She wasn’t all bad, cancer.  We learned to use her to our benefit and made no apologies for it.  She may or may not have gotten us a table by the window at an exclusive restaurant, when Vickie took off her turquoise baseball cap and revealed her sweet, bald, head.  She may or may not have made a trip to Florida possible, miraculously without our husbands or having to make even one pre-vacation casserole.  Whether or not she convinced us to skinny dip in a hotel pool just after midnight is not a fact for public consumption.

Mostly, she had a profound effect on our particularly wasteful theories of time-management.  We were forced to pack the friendship of a lifetime into less than 6 months.  Skinny-dipping was nothing.  Stripping life down into countable, measurable moments was the real offense.  The last vacation with her husband and children, the letters written after dark to be read when she was gone, the day she lay in the sunshine that poured onto the floor of the home she had raised her children in, asking God if he might change his mind.  He didn’t.

I hadn’t asked for this.  I’d never even said I wanted a best friend.  There was no script to refer to, no manual, nothing to tell me how I was supposed to respond.  I’d never had a half necklace. All I had was Vickie. Still there. Still teaching me.  Still calling or emailing or texting 40 times a day.  So, we did what any other respectable women would do in the face of such adversity:  we ate and shopped. 

Vickie bought shoes at Nordstrom that had cost as much as my utilities bill.  She asked for black napkins to place on the lap of our black pants at expensive Italian restaurants.  She bought an obnoxious, expensive red-orange SUV.  But, mostly, she loved.  Everyone and anyone that got in her way.  And, being a best friend meant I got to be there and watch from the sidelines, knowing that our time was up, but that I’ll always have the other part of the “necklace.”