A Friendship I Wish I Had

I once had the Friendship I Wish I Had.  She was the friend who loved wholeheartedly and absolutely unconditionally.

It was a pretty unlikely friendship.  She was in her 50's; I was in my 30's.  Her life was all put together; mine was a big, fat mess.  She was all empty-nested; I had a house full of kids.  She was so much fun; I was a stick in the mud.  She was young in her heart, younger than I was; I was so swamped in my dailiness, it was all I could do to get by.  I'm not sure we had anything in common, except that we both loved to laugh, and we laughed at the same things.  That was enough all by itself.  My sense of humor has always been rather skewed, and she got it in a way hardly anyone else ever did or has since.

Once she brought my newborn baby boy a gift of a pink outfit.  Not what one usually brings to a boy, but, as she explained, it was too cute to pass up, and pleeeeeze, would I allow her to give it to him?  We both had a good laugh about that, and I laugh about it still.

Every so often I and a couple of my kidlets would collect a batch of the local freebie newspaper and take them up to her house where we would sit around her table and pick out the typos and other errors and laugh til we cried.  Just thinking about it cracks me up all over again. 

My life was rife with problems; her life was perfect.  Ok, maybe not.  Looking back now from an age beyond where she was then, I suspect maybe she did have, or at least had had, a problem or two.  But she had learned how to cope, and she kindly and generously shared her wisdom and her self with me.

I don't remember its exact Beginning.  But I perfectly remember its sad Ending.

R.I.P. my friend.