I’ll Be There For You (Cause You’re There For Me Too)

Over Easter vacation my freshman year of high school, my parents sent me to Florida to visit my grandparents. If vacationing with your parents as a teenager is bad, vacationing with your grandparents is the kiss of death.

High school wasn’t an easy transition for me. Race riots in my public high school made my parents choose to send me to the Catholic one in the next town. It was virtually impossible to break into the cliques which were largely determined by which Catholic grade school you came from or the beach club you went to every summer. I was part of the small group of misfits.

Segue back to Florida at Easter: I was absolutely miserable being with these “old” people (reference point: if I was 14, then my grandmother was 56 and her second husband was 46). A couple of days into my hell we went to visit a family from New Jersey where the dad had worked with my grandfather the year before. It turned out that one of the sons was - gasp – the quarterback of my new school’s freshman football team. For the next couple of days whenever the families got together we hung out, until the one day that he had such bad sunburn he couldn’t go outside, so I spent the day talking to his one year older brother.

Back home, I told a girl on the bus about the guys I met. She was excited to tell me that her friend was going out with the older brother. After school that day, she dragged this girl over, who, in her extreme jealousy that I was in Florida with her guy, looked like I was destined to be school bus roadkill.

And that was how my BFF and I met 50 years ago.

Over the past 18,000 + days, we’ve probably talked on the phone close to that many times, laughed double that, cried half as much and had less disagreements than I can count on one hand. We went through our awkward teen years together and because of her, I survived high school and so much more We’ve gone from living in our parents’ homes with bratty brothers, to apartment roomies and meeting our ultimate spouses, to being married with our own sometimes bratty kids. We celebrated each other’s weddings and are godparents to each other’s children. Raised those kids together, and even where her girls and my boys were off doing different things, we always found something to talk and laugh about. We’ve buried three parents and one spouse. She cleaned out my scummy fridge when Wingman died, and helped clean out my muddy house after Sandy.

I will forever say that she has been a better friend to me than I’ve been to her. She’s given me some of my best life advice-even if at the time, I stubbornly refused to take it. When we were younger and single and sometimes liked the same guys, I joke that I did the “animal testing” by going out with them and saving her the aggravation. She ended up with the prize in the Cracker Jack Box-her plus one is a gem.

50 years after we met in that high school parking lot, we were back in almost the exact same spot celebrating her daughter’s marriage at the church next door. No hunter green jumpers with white Peter Pan collared shirts-we donned our Spanks and sparkles and shiny shoes that hurt our bunions to celebrate another life moment with her husband and all our kids in attendance.

In a blink of an eye, we’ve celebrated 50 trips around the sun. I can’t see out parallel course changing in the future, and look forward to always laughing and celebrating with her.

Minus the Spanks and shoes that hurt our bunions. We always were, and always will be bathing suits and flip flops kind of gals.