I have written a lot about friendships, about those few fertile times in my life that I’ve made special ones, about how few true native speakers I’ve met, about the immense value I place on my female friends. I was with one of those native speakers this weekend, and I can’t fully articulate the joy, ease, and sheer grace of being in her presence.
Q is unquestionably one of the people I love most dearly in the entire world. She is one of my first child’s godmothers. She is also a redhead with brown eyes, a combination I didn’t realize was unusual until I was an adult. We don’t see each other enough, but when we do we slip immediately back into shorthand. I think her husband is wonderful and she and Matt have private jokes of their own. She gets all of my references. She gets me.
I met Q 19 years ago, on a hot early-fall afternoon in Princeton. She is everything I want to be, myself. She is smart, funny, loving, honest, occasionally clumsy and frankly beautiful. We share a commonality of both history and outlook that is unique in my life. She has the rare position, shared by a few, of having both witnessed and deeply impacted my becoming who I am now.
We are peers and have moved through the stages of life largely in tandem. Some of our choices have been different but our essential values are near-identical. It was next to Q that I ran out Princeton’s FitzRandolph gate for the first time (legend holds that you cannot exit this gate until the day of your graduation, which is the day we did so). She was one of the first people I called when I got my heart broken, got into business school, got engaged, got pregnant. She wore blue as my bridesmaid and I wore coral as hers. We’ve talked about wrinkles and mortgages and crock pots and the delights and fears that populate our every single day as mothers.
Together we rode a ferris wheel on Saturday afternoon. High over Chicago, in a crystal-clear, cold blue sky. With our first-born children sitting, together, across from us. Up, up, up into the cloudless blue. Knocked around a little by the wind. Sitting next to each other we gazed around, laughing, wide-eyed. And then we rode slowly down down, completing the arc set in motion so many years ago.
I can’t think of many people I’m more grateful to have next to me on this ride.
I love you, Q. Thank you.
I love those days. Clear blue, true blue, all of that.
Thank you…
XOXO
I love this. I especially love the line about the bridesmaid dresses. There’s a lot of angst and I hate to say it- cattiness in female relationships- and sometimes I wish we could brush everything off like guys do. But a “bosom friend” like Q. makes me so grateful for close female friendships. There’s nothing like an old friend, someone who knows you inside and out.
I really value my female friendships, too, those the deepest ones I share live very far away (sadly). (Did you read Emily Rapp’s piece this week on the transformative power of female friendships? If not, I’ll send you the link, because I think you’d love it.) I am going to get to see my very best friend TWICE this year, and I am over the moon. I love the imagery and the metaphor of the ferris wheel (and the photo itself).
I love this. Although, to be honest, it makes me a touch sad. I am terrible at staying in touch and as a result, don’t have too many friendships like the one you describe. You seem to have many of them… Do share you secret!
Oh that time time with a kindred friend is like a warm bath for the soul. So glad you have her and she you. xo
A lovely tribute to the power of friendship and how important these connections are in our lives. Your post is a great reminder that we should all take the time to nurture these relationships.