Gingerbread Friends
Her right foot turns in like a pigeon’s but it has nothing to do with how her limbs were crisscrossed in the womb or even that her daddy’s turned in, too, because it didn’t, but more so because that’s what Jordan’s did when he shot and when she was young all she ever wanted to do was be like Mike. When I was little my mom used to say, “Be careful or your face will freeze like that.” Her intention was to make me choose an expression a bit more pleasant for the occasion at hand. But truth was buried in that warning. The things we do repeatedly for an extended period of time become ours. We assume them.
Eventually, my friend gave up basketball but she kept running. And she’s kept everything along the way. Every journal, every notebook, every scrap of paper with a quote or with a list. Everything in her artistic half cursive half print handwriting lives in boxes that she’s carried like a camel everywhere she’s been. She is the single most intentional person I have ever known. The boxes know even better than me. Maybe that‘s part of why she’s carried them with her all these years, in and out of all these places, and has never been able to make herself throw them away. The story of her life is there.
I’ve always carried a calendar in my head. But it doesn’t look like the one on outlook, or the one on my dad’s desk with a t shaped cardboard backed prop, or the one with perforated pages that hangs on all oil field company walls. It’s not in rows and it has no numbers, in my mind. There are no pages on this calendar in my head, it’s just a shape. January starts at around the eleven on a clock and it slides counterclockwise toward April which takes up an elongated kind of space. And then it sort of pivots, softly, on the month of May. May is the spacer between the chunks. May is curved. Then June and July stretch in a mild smiley face bend across the entire bottom where they connect with the stubby month of August that butts up against September which pivots, softly in an arc, a lot like May. And the train assembles through to January again. It’s anything but smooth and everything but symmetrical even though the two curved hinges make it sound as though it is. Every month has its own authentic size and the first of the year isn’t really in the middle, but it’s how I feel a trip around the sun. It’s the cycle of a school year, of course, though I never designed it to be that. It’s just that I’ve been a student or a teacher since the day that I was born. So that’s the shape a year takes for me.
My friend would understand that. She probably has one, too. Maybe hers takes a different form or maybe she doesn’t have one at all but she would understand how I could. We are ‘gingerbread friends’, she likes to say. Pieces complimenting parts, the unpredictability of one juxtaposed beside the other creating Camelot. We finish each other’s thoughts before they even make sentences sometimes. Everybody should have one of her.
When you’re a kid, your friends are your friends because of lots of things you can’t control. Geography, circumstance, where your parents work, who the teacher sits you beside in school. It’s a little bit of a ‘you get what you get and you got em’ sort of deal. Kind of like coaching high school sports. But it works, usually, in one way or another, for a while anyway. We fall in step with those in closest and most consistent proximity whether we really choose them or not. We hang out. We make do .
Mostly, however, childhood friendships are pants we get too tall for. Though, sometimes, we get lucky and they stretch with us as we grow. I have a couple made of Lycra. Angela and I were classroom competitors. We went all the way through school together, starting with first grade, though we were in different rooms. In middle school we grew closer as we were achievers racing through the colors of our SRAs. By the time we got to high school, it would have been hard to drive a wedge between us. We were thick as thieves. Together, we made lots of business plans, usually in Algebra class once we finished our assignments, way before the bell, of course. One we worked on for a while was a greeting card company that we were certain would put Hallmark to shame. I think we could have done it had I not been so hell bent on shooting free throws every day at lunch. Angela would concur. Both of us had naturally curly hair-- hers auburn, mine dirty blonde--that we twisted as we talked and schemed about all the big things we were going to do.
Beth Ann and I couldn’t have been more different. She was girly, I was a tom boy. She loved to cook, I loved to play basketball. She was quiet, I was anything but. But I laughed with her more than I did with TV sitcoms. She was side stitch funny, mostly by not trying to be. And oh, I loved her heart! My love of storytelling began on Beth Ann’s trampoline where we would lay on our backs and stare at the stars for hours building a life we wanted to live in. She was a quintessential listener before I knew what that even was or how much it mattered. Beth Ann was one of five siblings who stayed tan and skinny as a rail. We went everywhere together even though we walked in different ways.
We all made good grades—Beth Ann, Angela and a gaggle of others who ran with us in a pack. Some played sports, some cheered for those of us who were playing, and we all participated in choir, even though we really didn’t want to and we drove our instructor absolutely insane. We were all really good friends, but Ang and Beth and I stayed glued together. When we graduated from high school, we cried and gave each other scrapbooks, and pictures in frames, and monogrammed laundry sacks for domestic life in our respective dorms. The caps and gowns marked the transition of our friendship as we all three chose different colleges to follow different dreams. And through the years, the invisible threads weren’t always tight. There have been spans of significant time where there was a lot of slack in the lines. But we’ve always reeled each other in. Through career aspirations, around marriages, and across state lines, our friendship soul stays intact. So much grace is in our air.
My son has at least one, and my daughter, two or three, of these exceptional arm crook in arm crook relationships that have weathered the test of time. My brother had several, though a couple of his closest buddies have died. But not a lot make it even when both parties live long and lusty lives. The friendships just don’t survive time and space and off the edge of the earth falls. They’re not pliable enough to last, for a million and one reasons no one can ever really say for sure. But the ones that make it, they have sewn together guts. Insides that are tethered by time and all the becoming that’s wrapped around it like a myelin sheath. Childhood friendships are a conglomeration of your favorite stuffed animal, your junior prom dress, and the salty tears of your first broken heart. They have a flavor all their own. Like my Granny’s chocolate chip cookies. There really isn’t a recipe, and it’s hard to say exactly what makes them so mouth wateringly wonderful, but they are what you think about when you close your eyes to dream.
The friendships we enter into in adulthood are different. Not different good or different bad, just different. For starters, they don’t get the benefit of grace. Friendships formed at 30 don’t know what 13 looked like, and since most of us imagine everybody else’s better than it was, we’re full of expectation. Imagination fills in the gaps and we presume, if not assume, so many things that just aren’t so. That’s what gobbles up the grace.
But that doesn’t make them less than. Far from it. Grown up finds come creased with square edges and flaps, and sometimes lots of tape, and at the beginning you have absolutely no idea what might be inside. They’re a formidable discovery zone. Unfolding them is one of life’s greatest joys. It’s like Origami. You just can’t imagine how many different shapes a thing can take.
Finding a friend when you’re an adult is like getting pulled from the crowd on ‘Let’s Make a Deal.’ At first you can’t believe your luck. Then you have to find a safety pin in your purse. So you dig around and find a safety pin, of all things, and you’re beside yourself because, I mean, what luck! And the safety pin find means that you get to pick a curtain. Like you get to pick a curtain! Are you kidding me?? It’s overwhelming how the stars have aligned. You so didn’t see it coming. And then you pick curtain #3 and what’s behind it is someone you feel like you always knew. Touchdown dance in the aisle with Monte Hall! That’s what it feels like to be a grown-up who finds a forever friend.
We discover them everywhere and nowhere and all the places in between. Sometimes we bump into them when we’re falling backward. Life pops us with an uppercut and we go flying only to land at the feet or maybe even in the lap of someone we never knew we needed. Someone who’s been there, maybe, in the air, upside down and spiraling. Someone who recognizes, perhaps not the plight exactly, but definitely the trajectory. These friends share our scars, if not our birthmarks. They meet us at ugly and they choose to love us just the same
Others burst in the side door of the gym while you’re trying to run a practice, like your world is supposed to stop because they’re there. That’s how it went with Cindy. She was hungry for a job at a great school. And she was good at teaching—so good it’s not even fair, but no one knew that yet because she was young and unproven and the only way that she could prove it was if she could get a job. (the great oxymoron of experience) Her odds of getting the job increased dramatically if she could fill a need as a sophomore basketball coach. I had said need. Hence her bouncing hunger into my very humid and very busy gym. I liked her immediately. She had “will not be denied” written all over her face in magic marker, though I just couldn’t see a coach in her teacher dress and mother earth shoes. But we hired her, this prestigious high school and me. And I became her Thelma and she my Louise.
We don’t speak very often anymore. But that doesn’t mean we’re not connected. She’s lived a time zone away for two decades where she writes textbooks, and teaches for wages not much better than a fast food worker makes. But she is walking in the shoes God made for her to wear. Of that I am convinced. Together apart we have raised five children, her three and my two, through competitive sports, decisions about tattoos, broken hearts, and college choices. We’ve buckled one another’s bootstraps in the face of job loss, painful PR, empty nests, and knees that no longer like for us to run. We limp along in unison, celebrate in harmony, and ready one another when we see a bend that’s coming on a road we’ve already owned. Last week I sent her poems with soft edges. It was her turn to bury her Dad.
Sometimes we meet soul mates on the driving range or at a random table at a fundraiser while listening to Vince Gill, and that’s it. We’re fast friends. Buddies soldered together by the stuff nobody else sees. Friendships hooked in such happenstance root in with steroids and they grow like Kudzu. You can’t kill them if you try.
When I first met Marty K, she was wearing a big fancy hat like the ones you see wealthy women wear to the Kentucky Derby. She was a Bo Derek doppelganger, and one of those ladies whose age you can’t decipher no matter how long you look. Marty K was effortlessly striking in a room full of people who were trying desperately to be, and it had nothing to do with what she had on. She just radiated real. Half the room was terrified by her and the other half mesmerized. I didn’t recognize the divisions until later. I had just sat down beside her to eat a piece of cake.
Marty and I had nothing in common. She knew everybody in the place, I hardly knew a soul. My sundress didn’t go with her hat and I couldn’t do eyeliner like hers if I tried. And yet ,if it weren’t for all the trappings, the two of us could have been twins. We talked about stuff within minutes that most people over a lifetime never dare to say. To this day I don’t know how old she is—somewhere about half way between me and my mom is my guess—and she’s still always the prettiest girl in the room, especially if you’re comparing insides. Marty and I don’t see each other much, but when we do we catch up quickly on all the life that’s happened between our crossings. And it’s usually a lot at our stage in the game. We talk fast and we always want more time, but we don’t really need it. Friendships with soul anchors rarely rely on words.
Research tells us that we become like the five people with whom we spend the most time. I’ve often wondered if that’s physical time or mental time, the two being as different as dog and people years. But I don’t think it really matters in the long run. Time is time.
Research tells us that we become like the five people with whom we spend the most time. I’ve often wondered if that’s physical time or mental time, the two being as different as dog and people years. But I don’t think it really matters in the long run. Time is time. And assimilation is real, regardless. Just think of all the married people you know who have grown to look like one another over the years. We pick up stuff without really trying, rubbing off on those we ride with while they rub off on us. When I hang out with my friends from back east, I find myself cheek kissing like I understand it, though it’s always baffled my mind. And when I spend a long weekend with my buddy from the mountains, I come home saying ‘ain’t nobody got time for that” and ‘whyyyyyy’ with too many y’s. We pick up some of our comrades’ dialects, their mannerisms and their customs, whether we want to or not. But I hope I’m picking up more than that from mine. Because there are some hall of fame humans in my contacts under ‘friends’.
In my army are the kind of people who text “moon”---because it’s big and round and bright and because they know I’ll want to look and because we both are convicted it’s something everybody should see. And there are people who write poems in calligraphy and put them in tree shaped frames because they share my love of words and trees and gifts that money can’t buy in stores. There are people who show up and fight bare handed and build ladders with their teeth. Precious people who sit still. Who hold on tight. Who tear things up. Who understand which threads to pick and which ones to leave alone. People I am honored to walk with –and run and fly --and skip with, when need be. They sustain me, like the boxes my dear heart takes with her as she moves. They are the camel humps I carry. Water for my life.
Sherri Coale
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