With Love From Me, To You

I just returned home (greeted by a huge, black bug waiting for me on the kitchen counter) from a first ever three-day, two-night sleepover at one of my oldest friends, SC’s (no, not South Carolina’s) house. Because her husband is in Haiti, photo-documenting a pop-up medical clinic, and because one of her writer friends just published her first novel and was giving a reading, I drove almost two hours for some rare one-on-one time together (and to keep her from committing hari-kari from writerly jealousy).

Not once did we worry about monitoring our comments or behavior, stifling our laughter, or repressing our gastrointestinal comings and goings. Instead of worrying, we gossiped, ate too much and too often, laughed hysterically, confessed real and imagined sins, read aloud to each other from the New York Times, obsessed about our children, talked about books and the last episode of Mad Men, and sat quietly, side-by-side on the couch, our laptops on our laps, noodling around Computerland.

On my second day, we jumped into the car and drove to the neighborhood farm store for fresh mozzarella, which we combined with fresh-picked tomatoes and basil growing like crazy in the garden. We side-tripped to a favorite bakery, Lakota, to snap up a dozen outrageously sweet homemade cookies for late night noshing (a nice change from the fresh ice cream we scarfed down the night before). They were so sweet I was worried I’d lapse into a diabetic coma after one bite. 

We schlepped into Boston for the book reading at the Boston Public Library, easily found an ideal parking spot in a nearby parking garage, sat with our feet in a reflecting pool of water near an old church in Copley Square, then slowly dragged ourselves in the heat to the right room for the book reading. After the book signing and congratulating, we accidentally stumbled upon my husband’s favorite sushi joint on Newberry Street, where we sat on high-backed stools at the counter and stuffed ourselves once again.

We stayed up past midnight, our eyes closing and snapping back open as we talked and talked. We found out that we’re so in synch that we both recently bought expensive leather pocketbooks we’d coveted, but ended up with odd, non-traditional colors (coral and yellow) instead of more traditional brown and black. We both stored them in our respective closets in their individual cloth drawstring bags, and hid their ridiculously high costs from our husbands.

Are three-day visits, late-night talks, and wrong-colored pocketbooks the stuff of future novels? Nah. But we are: a friendship lasting 37 years, mixed and matched with loving kindness, easy camaraderie and shared memories, loud burps and inappropriate comments, wishes made on stray coins found heads-up on the street, and endless teachable moments. We might not be back in the USSR, but we sure do know how lucky we are.