The Joy of Reconnecting
Yesterday was a great treat for me, Gentle Reader. Joy, my best friend from grade school, was in town along with her husband, his teenaged sons and his team of high school golfers, and we got to spend all afternoon and evening catching up. Joy and I haven't really had much of a chance to talk since...well, a very long time.
I have to admit that I was a little nervous going in to our meeting because so much time has passed and I'm all too familiar with how two friends can grow apart as their respective lives take them on different journeys. Plus I'm not the most socially adept person on the planet, so I was a wee bit afraid of not having much to talk about.
Heh, boy was I silly to worry about that! We had plenty to talk about. We swapped tales of motherhood (Joy has a gorgeous daughter who's 8 and a mischievous son who's just a few months older than my mischievous kiddo) and wifery, dealing with in-laws, dealing with parents and dealing with the crazy stuff that happens in our relatively mundane lives. We caught each other up on what all had happened since we last saw each other, which was a brief visit to her home in OKC in May 2003 and just a week after the husband and I had received the boy's referral. We updated each other on our family members--and complained about 'em and laughed at 'em while we were at it. I got to tell Joy all about the various jobs I've held over the past few years; she got to tell me about the joys of teaching in a small-but-exploding school system, where she's been for a decade now. (Lucky her to have such job stability!)
We reminisced about our grade school days and teachers. We laughed about the blink-and-you'll-miss-it town we grew up in until she moved away to another blink-and-you'll-miss-it town. While my visits home to Bumblefuck have been relatively few and far between, she admitted that she hadn't been back in a long while. (I don't blame her!) We agreed we shouldn't let so much time pass between opportunities to get together.
In the early evening, the husband arrived home from work and, the FSM bless his heart, he was the proverbial third wheel as Joy and I continued to yak about so many of our shared experiences--not just the ones we had together as best friends (this was before that BFF crap) but as two people who grew up in the same rural area of a bass ackward state and as two women. And I found myself so very missing the very close friendship of a fellow woman. I have some really great, really close female friends with whom I've shared some really crazy experiences, but in a way there's nothing like the girl whom you grew up, who knew you were when you were horribly ugly and awkward and stuck with you nevertheless and with whom you could always click despite the distance and the time that had passed.
I still have every letter Joy sent me during the summers and, later, during the years after she'd moved away. I still have the halved coin necklaces we shared as a sign of our best friendship, every birthday gift and every school picture. Yup, there's nothing like a best friend.
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