Friendship can last a lifetime with planning

The Boston Herald

Anne used to live on my street, a quarter of a mile away. A million years ago when our children were small we hung out together, at her house in the winter and at my house in the summer. Lauren and Amy were best friends. They were 8 and 9 then, bright, fanciful little girls who were always doing cartwheels and singing and playing dress up and creating dramas that they insisted we watch.

Anne and I never got to finish a conversation. It was always: "Mommy, look at me! Mommy, watch. Mommy, we're gonna do dives now and you need to rate them." "Now we're gonna do handstands." "Will you play Monopoly with us?" "Can we make sugar cookies?" Early on we gave up on ever having a conversation with a beginning, middle and end. Someday, we said, shaking our heads. But the truth is we never believed in someday.

My daughter could tell you the year and the month they moved away. She stood in the kitchen, her shoulders slumped. "It isn't far, honey," I told her. "It's only the next town." But to a child the next town is as distant as the moon. There would be no more walking to Amy's, no more trips to the L'il White Store, no more "Can I stay for dinner?" None of the impromptu things on which a childhood friendship depends.

Our daughters still played when we got them together, still put on shows, still giggled and swore to each other that they would always be "best friends." And they were. In spite of the move. They would be friends even now, 20 years later. They would meet after work or e-mail or sing up a storm at some piano bar. They would be friends, but Amy never got to be an adult. She had cystic fibrosis and died a week shy of her 12th birthday. The family moved again, first to Wareham, an hour away. Then to Lancaster, N.H., three hours away. Still, despite the moves and the years Anne and I have remained friends.

But it's hard to be friends from a distance, too easy to put off meeting, to be content with telephone conversations. When she was an hour away we'd meet regularly for dinner. Since she has been three hours away we meet occasionally for lunch in Concord, N.H., an hour-and-a-half drive for each of us. We have no interruptions at these lunches, no "Mommy! Look at me!" But we still never finish a conversation, the lunch over too quickly, our eyes on the clock, places to go, things to do, and no children begging us to stay just a little longer, "Pleeeease, Mommy!"

Sunday we took a lesson from our children, pretended we were kids and did what grown women don't but should do. We met for a sleepover. Luck brought us to a newly restored, Victorian-style inn with turrets and no two rooms alike in downtown Concord. There were cookies and cocoa in the lobby. We ate dinner in the dining room. We talked and went back to our turret room and ate more cookies and talked. And in the morning, we started all over, eating and talking our way into the afternoon.

Why didn't we think of this before? Why had we waited all these years to do something we would have done in a heartbeat if our children had said they wanted to do it? After 20 years we finally had a conversation with a beginning, middle and end. We finished not just sentences, but entire thoughts. It was a first, but not a last, we said, already making plans to do this again.