Happy Birthday, Jake
Today my dearest friend in the whole world, Jacquie, will blow out candles with her hubby and kids from her home in the Okanagan.
Jacquie and I met in the late 80′s (man, that sounds old???) in University. The first time we met, she was doing a verbal presentation for one of our rec admin classes, and her speech was entitled: “What is culture?” Her voice shook as badly as her knees throughout that whole speech, and if she’d actually looked at her audience once instead of her paper … they’d have seen that she nearly peed her pants. After the class, I felt compelled to talk to this girl that look so incredibly terrified of her assignment. “That was good,” I lied, straight-faced. And our friendship began. We’ve studied together, drank a lot of beer together, graduated together. We’ve wiped tears off one another’s faces, and caused some to be there with a lot of laughter. We’ve listened and we’ve talked. Usually over Diet Coke and salt ‘n’ vinegar chips (in-house conversation food) or sushi or Thai if we’re out. We’ve travelled some together and gotten into crazy situations just as 20-ish something-year-olds really should. We’ve confided. A lot. We’ve stood by one another’s side as matrons of honour. We’ve rocked one another’s babies.
University was the last time we’ve lived in the same city. It sucks, frankly, but I’ve come to terms with it. When we shared an apartment in University, we got NOTHING done. We’re horrible procrastinators together, mostly because we get so caught up in conversation that the real world (ie. dishes, laundry, eating) goes unnoticed. So in the interest of my Troy, Derek, and Camryn, and her Jensen and Eli … not to mention our very tolerant husbands … we’ll live apart.
She’s the one who first introduced me to the seawall that I’ve written about often. And, I must add, she’s a faithful runner, out running in her beautiful neighbourhood on Lake Okanagan each morning.
I do hope you have a friend like her. Someone that you can so naturally be with, it feels like you would trust that person to breathe for you. Someone who you can go a month without talking to, and feel right at home at the first “hello”. Someone who knows every crook of your history, so there is no lengthy prologues to sharing a story. Someone who’d you trust to the end of the earth, to whom you’d give an organ without even signing a waiver. Someone with whom you have a vocabulary, and private jokes that make your children roll their eyes. Someone who you can talk to as easily as you can sit in silence. Someone who would move in when you have your third child and hold your baby so that you can keep your older sons’ lives semi-normal and read them a bedtime story in peace. That kind of friend. Everyone deserves to have that kind of friend.
We still joke that if she’d been a really great public speaker circa 1988, we’d probably have never met.
I am so blessed by her in my life.
Happy Birthday, noodle.
