What Has Changed, or The Evolution of Being, part XI

Just as I was always there to pull her out of whatever crazy scrape she had gotten herself into, that girl was always there for me.

As children, our days were filled with bicycles, roller skates, hopscotch, jump rope, kick ball, tree forts, legos, Barbie's, skateboards, hide-and-seek, and lots and lots of laughter.

As pre-teens, boys began to fill our minds and bedroom walls. Ace of Base blasted on our stereos and we watched The Sandlot a hundred times to drool over Benny Rodriguez. "You're killin' me, Smalls!" became a regular part of our conversation. We watched TGIF on ABC for Uncle Jesse and Balki Bartokomous. Mr. Bean was our hero and Monty Python and the Holy Grail was our reality.

As teenagers, our late night walks around the block became vital to our survival in the dog-eat-dog world of high school. Not attending the same school, it was our only time to relieve the pressure of the daily torture received from the tongues of our classmates. And our only time to discuss our crush-of-the-week.

In college, everything changed. The rare phone call couldn't replace our midnight walks. And life got in the way.

She was the maid-of-honor at my wedding, one of the first people at the hospital to hold my new baby, and back every night for midnight walks during the two weeks that it took my mom to die. She cried with me and held me, knowing that she had lost a mother too.

And life got in the way.

I was the matron-of-honor at her wedding, the first person she called when they had to put her dog down, and the one she turned to when a childhood friend popped back into her life out of the blue.

This time - life will not get in the way.

What Has Changed, or The Evolution of Being, part X

As we were growing up, this girl dragged me into so much trouble. (I say dragged, but it really didn't take THAT much persuasion, I'm sure.) And I was always dragging her injured butt back out.

There was the time she went down Suicide Hill on her roller skates realizing at the last moment that there was too much gravel at the bottom and thought she would stop instead by jumping off the pavement into a lawn. That worked. After she somersaulted 15 times through the grass, she did stop. And I carried her home.

There was the time we rode our bikes to the park, got into a fight, and I took off toward home leaving her a hundred yards behind screaming my name. And then the guilt set in because I couldn't see her behind me anymore. I turned around and started to ride back when I saw her screaming and crying from the top of a conversion van on the side of the road. She had slammed
her bike so hard into the back bumper of the van, the tire got stuck and she was catapulted to the roof. And I carried her home.

There were a thousand times we were building a fort in the woods behind my house and she NEVER wore sneakers. Flip flops were her shoes of choice and she paid dearly for it every summer. Every summer, she would find the one board in the woods with a rusty nail sticking through it, step on it and drive the nail up into her foot. And I would carry her home.

There was the time our neighborhood association decided to drain the manmade lake at the park and clean all the sludge from the bottom. Of course they picked the rainiest summer in ten years to pull this off so every time they pumped the lake dry, it would rain and fill back up again. All the parents in the neighborhood had forbidden the kids to go to the park because it was too dangerous to go into the lake. But she talked me into going to the park to play... and then she decided to walk out on the partially dry lakebed. Fifty feet out my eighty pound 10-year-old best friend sinks thigh deep into the muck and starts screaming for me to help her. And I go. Walking my 130 pound, 12-year-old, stupid self into the lake behind her. God was smiling... no, God
was laughing his butt off at us that day, and somehow I managed to slog my way through the muck, pry her skinny behind out of it, and carry her out of the lake. She walked herself home that day.

There was the time it rained for two days straight and the whole neighborhood flooded. When the rain finally stopped, she and I met outside on that muggy, disgusting day to explore our water-logged street. The creek that ran two doors down had flooded over the street, deeper than we had ever seen before. Somehow, she convinced me to go swimming in the neighbors yard. After
five minutes or so, she starts to scream for help. At 12 and 14, we had no idea of the dangers of underwater culverts and flooded drainpipes. She was being sucked into the steel pipe that drained the creek under the road. This time, God did not laugh. This time was real life and death although we did not know it at the time. We pulled with every ounce of strength we both had and managed to release the suction and pull her free. That day, I carried my bruised and injured best friend back home.