Handprint

I learned to laugh at myself one summer day, circa 1983, on my front porch.  Suzy, my first friend and next door neighbor was over and she was teaching me a song from the Eurythmics. 

“Sweet dreams are made of this, who I am to disagree? I travel the world and the seven seas, everybody’s looking for something….”.    She sang confidently out into the open, holding an imaginary microphone. She was nine months older and one school grade ahead of me.  In other words, she was old enough to give me advice.

So I tried, but without the microphone.

“Sweet dreams are made of this, (pause)

who I am to disagree? (pause)

I travel the world….”

Abruptly, she cuts me off.

“No, like this” she sings, louder: “Sweet dreams are made of THIS,” (emphasis)

“Sweet dreams are made of THIS,” I repeat.

And again:

 “Sweet dreams are made of THIS,

WHO am I to DISAGREE, I travel THE world…

It went on.  For some reason she was determined that hour to help me get the tempo right. I was shameless in front of her, no pretend pride, we’d met when we were four, after all.  She knew my deepest secrets, my weird fears, my private matters. She had been witness to all big occasions- first lost tooth, first bra, and the events in between.  So I kept trying, despite failing, until the entire song was reduced to one simple sentence of beats that she patiently counted out.  And then, we both laughed --at me.

Although we had endless amounts of days like this —strawberry milk at her house, grilled cheese at mine, Suzy and I eventually went our separate ways, until finally, I couldn’t see her window at night.  We caught up at our weddings but that was it.  Our overlapping childhood was replaced with the separations of time, maturity, and shifting allegiences; divergence to different paths age often brings. We lost touch during the busy-ness of our twenties and she died before we could reconnect in our later years to relive our early memories of our days up in her apple trees.  There is no one else who knows me in the way that she did.  And although we could only see what was different back then, I now see that the differences fueled our early connection.

Rachel entered my life during my college years, in the form of a teaching mentor and advisor. Just graduated with a Doctorate from Harvard, she held none of the loftiness one would expect. Instead she approached life with a gentle but direct intellect that informed her observations.  She’d notice the details, the child in the corner who was getting overlooked or the teacher who took shortcuts. Her honesty was heartfelt, and always meaningful, she did not shy away from constructive advice. Her goal was to create growth--in any place or person- she found. I looked up to her as my teacher and felt the separation that hierarchy demands but that perspective changed one day in a public school in Western Mass.  Rachel happened to be eight months pregnant, which in itself was tiring with her workload. But added to that she had a horrible case of poison ivy.  Covered, swollen and itchy in a pink dotted tent dress, she actually started to cry during her assessment of me.  And in that moment I was startled to realize that Rachel didn’t just see me as her student, she saw me as a friend.

When I finished school, she sustained her interest in me, writing me long letters in her careful cursive writing, month after month through the years. She always shared details of her life, her efforts at teaching reading to those who needed it most, shaking her head at misguided establishment bureaucracies that prevented kids from getting needs met, her yearly experiences with her Fresh Air Fund Child, the list continued. I remained in awe—both by her patience and her willingness to share her time with me during her very full life.  In fact, I was never as good at writing long letters, but would try to make up for things by long phone calls to catch up, though it felt like cheating. I never wanted to disappoint her. I still remember where I was standing when I got her letter that detailed her “latest challenge”, as she described it: stage four cancer.  Reading the words over and over again, I slowly digested the sadness that she carefully left out. At her funeral, about seven years later, the Shaker song she chose was so fitting it made me weep as it rang true in the big church —“tis a gift to be simple, tis the gift to be free, tis a gift to come down where we ought to be…

and when we find ourselves in the place just right, ‘twill be in the valley of love and delight.”   

And finally, Charmaine appeared with the arrival of Will, my firstborn.  She lived right next door in our little row of townhouses. Despite being my age and childless (not by choice), she’d pop over without knocking and burst in like the ray of sunshine we needed but could not find-even though our shades were up. Long days alone with a newborn are disorienting, especially when there is no particular schedule. I had actually run out of things to say to Will by 9am.  But then, there she’d be, at our most desperate moment—chatting away about anything, nothing, about the strawberry that I was holding, waving it in front of Will excitedly. I’d be in my pajamas but she was from Texas, so she was in her high heels and makeup.  I’d ask her where she was going, and she’d answer “to the grocery store,” and I’d say something like “you don’t have to dress up to go to the store here in NJ, like that” and she’d just look at me quizzically.  (To this day, whenever I accidently end up at Kings in my slippers, I think of Charmaine). She rambled on with Will and he smiled back at her, clearly relieved by her lightness of being. She taught me how to make real barbecue and gave me a Junior Women’s League Texas edition cookbook that I have cherished over the years.  (Those Texan women must be pretty competitive because I have never owned a recipe book with so many good recipes. Usually you have to buy a whole series.) Charmaine ended up moving a year or two later, and we gradually lost touch. With the advent of Facebook about fifteen years later, I was able to thank her for her help during that first year of Will’s life before she abruptly died of pancreatic cancer last spring.

So this is the gift that death leaves behind to those still alive, a sudden and complete understanding of the essence of the person, which remains like a permanent handprint in our lives. The other details, the details of our differences fade away in the wake of premature endings.  Instead, we are left remembering the specific light of that one person that glowed in its very particular way.  I’d like to think that I made the most of the relationships I had with these three particular women—women that intersected my life at critical junctures.  But the truth of the matter is, is that I didn’t.  There were reasons of course.  Busy with different paths. Busy with life. Busy with kids. Or even busy inserting other people in the places that those people left empty when we changed towns. But now I look back and think about how each one of them changed me so specifically, that of course they have always been irreplaceable. Their absence is only softened by their permanent mark on my life.