Sometimes it seems like too much work to make friends. I meet another mom at daycare, she seems cool, she asks me to lunch, we email back and forth a hundred times and finally find a date and we go and it is nice enough, though I have to think about what I’m saying (I better not make fun of that annoying teacher at daycare in case Laura likes her). She suggests dinner with husbands, and I say, sure, and I put it on my to-do list to get some dates to her, and after another one hundred emails, we arrive at a evening that will work for all four of us. Next, I put find a babysitter on my to-do list and to mention to my husband not to make fun of the annoying teacher at daycare because I do indeed think Laura likes her.
This might not be worth it.
Which is why I was so excited on a recent Friday night when my husband handed me the phone and said it was Louise. It was obvious he couldn’t quite place her in his mind. Who could blame him? I myself hadn’t seen Louise in years.
But there was a time when she was one of my best friends. And it was the best kind of friendship. Easy. Natural. Meant-to-be. I never spent a minute thinking about what to say. She was never on my to-do list.
I first met Louise in the Atlanta airport when we were both seventeen as we waited for a plane to take us up north to a summer academic program at Bennington College. Once in Vermont, we stuck together pretty much non-stop for the month-long program. Partly it was because we, in our prep-school clothes (In one picture, I’m wearing striped J. Crew shorts, bobby socks, white Keds, and a white T-shirt with a pocket on the chest) and southern accents (Louise is from South Georgia and I’m from Tennessee), did not fit in at the artsy school where everyone seemed to be either from California or New York. They were already eating organic and this was the late ’80s! People looked at us like were martians. But I think we would have become friends no matter where we’d met.
