Many years ago, there was a television program entitled, "The Courtship of Eddie's Father." It was a story of a widower and his young son feeling their way in the world as a duo when they should have been a trio. The theme song for the program is still indelibly etched into my hearing:
"People let me tell you 'bout my best friend,
He's a warm hearted person who'll love me till the end. People let me tell you bout my best friend,
He's a one boy cuddly toy, my up, my down, my pride and joy.
People let me tell you 'bout him he's so much fun
Whether we're talkin' man to man or whether we're talking son to son.
Cause he's my best friend.
Yeah he's my best friend." (lyrics by Harry Nilsson)
I have been blessed in my lifetime - to date - to have two people I consider my best friends. One has been in my life for 35 years now, and is my soulmate and husband. The other has been at my side for 49 years now, and is my prime partner in crime and my rock for all that time. We have this reciprocal agreement, she and I: you keep bail money on hand for me and I for you, and if we're in together, we just party.
This is about those 49 years. We used to laugh at whose mother thought the other person was the worst influence. We were an entity unto ourselves back in junior high and high school, always a bit aloof and observing what we considered all-too-often moronic behavior amongst our classmates. If we had gone to the library all the times that pretext was used to get the family car for the evening, we'd have been Phi Beta Kappa.
We kept each other's secrets and still do. Want to know where the bodies are buried? Don't ask. Waterboarding won't get it out of us. We've been through different marriages together - some from hell, today's a gift from God - and feel ownership of one another's adult children and even their children.
We've lost touch off and on over the years, as can be expected, but as soon as the SOS is sent out, each is there for the other. She's puked down the back of my neck. I fell down the step in her living room and was laughing so hard I didn't realize I had broken my foot for almost a week. We've been one another's lifeline when the ship was going down fast and the suction threatened to take a victim.
She's smarter than I. She can do math and chemistry and all that stuff, in addition to artistic talent and the ability to write like one of the masters. But at this age, it all comes down to who remembers what, so the playing field evens out more.
We worry about one another. Big, I mean big, life changes are going on in both our lives. But do we call one another and boo-hoo? No. She says she has a gallstone, I send her a photo of mine in a perverse game of one-upsmanship. She faces extremely serious surgery and I send her photos of Young Frankenstein working on the monster. My life is falling apart and she manages to get a meal to my family from the west coast. I want to go be with her, but the rivers between us run too deep and it's not a good time. It's better to stay here and remind her of how her siblings used to put the newborn kitties on the skateboard and zoom them across the kitchen when mom and dad weren't home.
It's hell getting old. Our bodies begin to mess with us in a major way and some of us fall down in our own driveway due to mysterious circumstances involving the dogs. The aches and pains don't go away as easily as they used to do. But mentally we're still in Algebra II and I'm at the board with her paperwork because the teacher has called on me and I have no clue. The numbers on the board are perfect; it's my deer-in-the-headlights look when the teacher asks for an explanation that makes it a classic moment.
Well, girlfriend, here's to falling down (the main stairs) and getting back up, to driving with no headlights down Harrison Street, to having to basically disassemble the car door to clean it out after an indulgent evening, to making a play to act cool and totally blowing it (a certain parking curb at Mac's comes to mind), to baby girls finding out what baby boys look like without their diaper, to "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", and finally to you not expecting this fat old woman in a wheelchair at LAX.
There's a line in a movie that I just love, and it's me and my bestie. It is in the form of a toast, and I'm bellowing it at her now:
"Here's to us and those like us.
Damn few left."
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