lifelong friends

Lifelong friends, 1953 and 2019

Just three months older, she’s known
me longer than I've known myself,

babes in bassinets, gabbling to each other
then...now we confide, readying for bed

nestled under the covers in a city
far from either of our homes.

“What are you reading?” she asks me.
"The English Patient", I answer.

She reaches into her bag and conjures up
her own worn copy. What are the odds

that two women, lifelong friends
would find themselves in a hotel room 

in Florida, each carrying the same book
over twenty years after it was written?

That we, in a unity of unalikes, would stash
in our luggage by chance, the tangled intrigue  

of a disfigured man, a nurse, a Sikh
and a thief converging in an Italian villa,

as we’ve converged, drawn into a dreamy
web by love that supersedes geography.

“We should meet again like this sometime”,
I say, a whispered wish on the evening star;

and we will, hunkered down
between the covers of the same book.

Liz McFadzean

Who are the cute little girls in the photo on this page?  The one on the left is me, and the one on the right is my first cousin, “Susie”. Since our Aunt Martha died, there are now only two remaining members of the family who have known me since birth: Susie who is three months older than I am, and her older sister “Jandy”.  Our fathers were brothers and very close. They worked together, and we all lived in Indianapolis until Susie’s family moved to Grand Rapids when we were in the tenth grade. 

Her move was a blow. We had been looking forward to being in the same school for years.  We went to different grade schools and different junior high schools, but the latter fed into the same high school, so finally we would be in homeroom together. 

It didn’t last long. By January her family had relocated to Michigan, so we didn’t see each other as much.  We still had summers at the lake, although by that time my parents were divorced, so I didn’t get up there for long.  To top it off, Susie was a cool cheerleader and I was a bit of a nerd. So there were many years when we strained to find things in common.

And then we had our first daughters two years apart, our second children eight months apart and our first grandsons ten days apart.  All these shared events have given us a closeness that is symbolized in the poem by our taking the same book on our trip to a family wedding. 

In some ways Susie and I see the world differently, but we know the value of a shared history and love. And for that I am profoundly grateful. I love you, Susie Q!