T

Here I am with my friend T. I saw her this weekend when I was in Portland. I think it had been almost a year since we last saw each other. Lately, we have been keeping in touch through blogging and instant messaging. Isn't the internet great?

We go way back, us two. We met one fateful day in sophomore health class in 1982. I don't think we knew many people in the class and we just happened to be sitting next to each other. We kept each other entertained in that class and later when we took typing together. We became best friends through the next year - shared a locker and decorated it in various themes, stayed overnight at each other's houses. T introduced me to the concept of cold pizza for breakfast. We sang Eurythmics tunes at the top of our voices and generally made a nuisance of ourselves. That all ended at the end of our junior year when we broke off our friendship due to parental pressures. Ahem... Our mothers did not approve of each other. We were so different, really. She was kind of wild and dangerous to me. I was considered a goody-two-shoes, and not just by T, but others in my class. I must admit, we were an unusual match. So from that second fateful day, we hardly even spoke until our graduation day when we acknowledged each other with a brief good-bye, good luck, etc.

I went off to college and that was that. But, up popped T a few years later. She contacted me through my mom who had not moved. We had some casual contact a couple of times, but then came back into each other's lives in a big way in 1990. She had been living out of the state and was looking for a place to live so she could move back to Portland. So we became roommates for the first time. Since then, we have shared an apartment three times, attended the same church and home group, prayed together, studied together, told each other all our secrets and made a commitment to always stand by each other. As we've gone through different stages in our lives, we've been in close contact and out of contact. But, with the exception of Denis, there is no one who knows me quite as well as T. (Well, probably my mom does too, but not quite in the same way.) Our personalities are still very different, but we do have a bond that we are convinced will not be broken.