True friendships can easily pass test of time and distance

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

We met for lunch Thursday. I hadn't seen her in so many years that I was afraid I might not recognize her. But I did - instantly. There she was waving to me from a table, same blonde hair, same big smile. People don't change. They just become more of who they are.

We were good friends for a while, way back when friendship was easy, when every day was play day. We were pregnant together, due within weeks of each other. We were pregnant for the first time - excited, scared and young.

I used to drive from Canton to Rockland and pick her up, because I had a car and she didn't. We'd go to the library or to a fabric store or back to her house and read (she had so many books) or sew and stare at the wind-up swing someone had given her and the pile of T-shirts and diapers and sleepers neatly folded on the table. Imagine, we'd say, there's going to be a baby here in a few months. Imagine what it will be like when we both have babies.

We'd look at that swing and watch it rock and listen to its clickety-click and try to picture an infant - mine, hers - sitting in it. But as hard as we tried we could not imagine ourselves as mothers.

She had a girl in October and I had a boy in November and after, it was impossible to imagine that there was a time when we weren't mothers. We took to it as if we'd been born for it. We must have taken at least a few weeks off away from each other to adjust and adapt. But I don't remember this. I remember a string of uninterrupted visits, a blue bunting, strapping my son in a car seat and driving along Route 3, not listening to the radio anymore, but to the soft sounds of an infant's breath.

We became even more inseparable, Judy and I. We pushed baby carriages through snow and shopping malls and lugged them into libraries, though many days we just stayed at her house and talked or read while our babies slept, then played with them when they awoke.

In the summer, we took them to Nantasket - playpens, umbrellas, light clothes, warm clothes, Gerber meat sticks, thermoses full of cold milk.

"Why do you do this?" my mother-in-law used to say. "It's so much work."

But it never felt like work. Not a moment of it. Not all the in and out of cars and car seats and coats and hats and trying to guess what they wanted before they could put their needs in syllables, then words.

"Do you remember how you made those brown plaid outfits that matched?" my friend said all these years later. I made her daughter a skirt, a cape and a hat, and my son short pants, a vest and a cap. When they wore them, people thought they were twins. We used to like this. We were that close.

"They were good days, weren't they?" she said Thursday.

"They were the best."

Now all these years later, we were picking up where we left off.

Why did it end? Because childhood does. Because for those first babies and those first years, we were children playing house.

Then the wolf came to the door.

It was my fault our friendship faded. Rockland was suddenly too far away. I had two children, a very sick mother, too much to do to play every day. I visited occasionally, then never.

Years passed, so many of them. We hadn't seen each other for decades before she moved to Florida. But that's not quite true. One Thanksgiving she and her husband and two children came over. But that, too, was a long time ago.

Thursday, we sat at a table for a few hours and all those years and miles disappeared. I didn't recognize her children in some of the pictures she showed me. And she hardly recognized mine.

But we recognized something else, something we saw in each other when we first met, a person we liked and trusted.

"You don't remember the day I suddenly couldn't see and you drove me over to South Shore Hospital where I had all kinds of tests and you had to watch all the kids?"

No. I didn't remember.

But Thursday wasn't just about going back. It was about going forward. "Let's keep in touch," we said, as we hugged goodbye.

"I'll be back at Thanksgiving and I'll call," she said. I hope she does.