Highest
I walked into the house today to find Kristi’s daughter,
Emily, here with my daughters, watching TV and doing homework, probably just as
she’d do at home. I came into the bedroom where they were all engaged in
different activities: Katie on the computer, Joey reading. Katie must have been
IM-ing with someone about our upcoming trip, because Emily was saying to her,
“I keep thinking about
I invited Emily to eat over; she accepted, knowing she was
welcome and that her parents wouldn’t mind. “I feel like family,” she
said, almost out of the blue. “Good. I’m glad,” I said.
Katie and Emily met on the school bus a few year ago, and I
met Kristi briefly when she dropped Emily off at one of Katie’s birthday
parties. She struck me immediately as somebody I wanted to get to know. She just
had a presence, somehow, and I liked
that. We chatted occasionally when we ran into each other at parties or choral
concerts, and eventually I came out to see her husband’s band. Since then we
have become friends, in what has been described as the European way – slowly
but permanently. And nothing would please me more than that being true.
Last year I found myself at a place in my life – as we all
have or will at some point – where the smallest kindness would make me high,
and where also the smallest perceived injustice would leave me in pieces. I
needed, too, to push myself into some semblance of a social life, but to sit
with couples would have been unbearable, at least for that little while. I
didn’t have a circle of girlfriends who could come to my aid at the drop of a
hat – the chosen women were states away, all of them.
But the company of women was what I needed, and Kristi
unknowingly offered it to me in the form of the band’s reserved tables, all
over the northern part of this state, where the wives sat and talked, or rose
and danced, with each other, while their men played. She told me – and more
importantly, convinced me – that I was welcome any night, and I was. She
pulled me into her group, and through those difficult nights.
As I got to know her, I found out that Kristi is, well, the
sort of person I’d like to be in many ways. While I’m pretty comfortable
right now with my love life, I often envy her almost-20-year marriage to a man
who still clearly and publicly adores her. She’s a Christian who witnesses by
her own unashamed example. She’s cool without being silly, or at least not too
silly. She has found for (and given to) her daughters that fragile balance
between attention and space that I struggle with. She’s a good person, and
confident, and together. Occasionally, though, she lets me see her own
insecurities, her own faults and mistakes; they just peek through the exterior a
bit, and I take it as a gesture of trust that she shows them to me. It means a
lot, that faith, both because of the gift that it is, and because I want a
friendship with her – hers is one of the first female friendships that I’ve
actively pursued. One that I’ve felt I’ve earned the pleasure of having.
Two nights ago, we drove together to yet another show, where
I’m now a regular, where I now have the ability to pull in someone else who
might need that sort of company, on any particular night, for any particular
reason. Kristi drove, and we talked about the trip. She told me that she
sometimes finds herself wondering what she is doing, sending her daughter all
the way to
She said that she wasn’t worried, though. That if she was
going to send her daughter on a trip, there’s nobody in her life that she’d
send her with but me. Just about the highest vote of confidence and trust I can
think of. I silently promised I’d live up to it.