Kiki, Now and Then

I really like meeting people as the person I am now, and though I look forward to years of slowly filling in details and stories and hearing theirs in exchange—seeing the elemental values of a relationship grow with each visit—there’s nothing that can ever take the place of someone who knew you when and likes you, loves you, in spite or because of it.  When that someone is part of the present, then you have the rarest of all friendships; you speak your own language, a kind of shorthand only available to childhood friends, where a word or phrase conjures up major portions of your life.  With such a friendship you know and accept all of the changes that have occurred over time; you know the past history that shapes the present, and you know the surface appearance and all that lies underneath.”

—From the essay “Cathy, Now and Then” by Jill McCorkle

 I have always loved this quote which has lived in my heart and in my memory for over two decades now.  I dug out the old book of essays this weekend and was struck that the book is called The Seasons of Women given the theme of my first post.  I read this shortly after I graduated from college and also shortly before I met Chad.  My cousin Kristie was my first thought then, as she is now.  There is no friendship on the planet that fulfills the spirit of that quote more than that of my first friend and I.  So much was different about my life then.  I lived alone in a tiny, 2 bedroom house—tinier than most apartments.  I worked second shift at a local window factory as an assembly line supervisor which was an absurd pivot from my first 22 years of life and the degree I had just earned.  Babies and mortgages and midlife angst were a lifetime away.  What wasn’t different?  Kristie was there.  

She lived in Ames and worked in Des Moines—which put us a little over an hour apart. She had interned with her employer while in college and had accepted a full time position afterwards, opting to keep her apartment in her college town and commute the 45-ish minutes rather than leave her friends and the life she had built there.  She had a boyfriend and I worked second shift, and we just didn’t see each other much.  It was the days before texting and social media, so there wasn’t an effortless way to keep in touch.  We’d connect at all the major holidays back home with the family and sporadically in between.   Even then, I know we were rarely out of each other’s thoughts for long stretches of time.  We were—are--just too inextricably connected.

For the first 18 years of our life, every week of our existence was interwoven.  We never lived close enough to be together every single day, but it was a rare week that didn’t find us together in some manner—for her mom the hairstylist to cut my hair or for my mom the nurse to check out one of her sister’s rashes or cuts.  Or for our families to meet up for a barbecue or for one or the other to spend a few hours at the other’s house while our moms ran errands.  Her house was like my house, and I still don’t knock before walking in though she hasn’t lived there in almost 25 years (her mom is my godmother after all).  We grew up almost like sisters, and there is literally no phase of my life that she does not figure prominently in.  

I was 8 months old when she was born—a joyful fact that I lorded over her through the acquisition of driver’s licenses and 21st birthdays, and which she has lorded over me ever since.  I may have gotten to drive first, but I was also 30, then 40, too soon 50 first and so on.  Family lore has it that I called her “Kiki” before I could master the more difficult nuances of her actual name, and the nickname has stuck.  

Today is her birthday.  Her birthday, and her childhood phone number (556-3249), the name of her imaginary friend (Kelly Momo.  Mine was Kanga), the location of her birthmark (inside of one ring finger—her mom used to try and scrub it off because she thought it was grease from playing in the garage with her dad), her aversion to milk (not quite an allergy—in those decades before “dairy free” was a thing), her proclivity to cracking her knuckles (even in her sleep), how she used to love to say “let’s play house or go swimming” a thousand times a weekend in the years when we spent endless days at our grandparents’ “farm”, her humor, her loyalty, her courage—a thousand memories and a thousand details are as familiar to me as the details of my own story.  They are my story.  Where does one actually begin to craft a birthday tribute to a person so near, so dear, and so familiar it is nearly impossible to conjure more than a handful of important memories in an entire life that she doesn’t feature at least peripherally in.

That’s not quite true.  I do recall the time her family went on a vacation to the East Coast (Philadelphia and DC areas I believe) without us (our dads were best friends, our moms beloved sisters, our little siblings all aged within a year of one another).  We vacationed together a lot, though not exclusively.  When she came home and told us about it I still recall an odd discomfort almost like “how could she have seen these things without me?”   As I sit here recalling it, the only similar experience that comes to mind is when I met someone at my oldest child’s daycare who referred to me as “Grace’s mom.”  I remember thinking how strange it was that my tiny, precious child had “met” someone I didn’t know.  It gave me pause—this first ever moment of realizing she would—in fact did—have a life completely separate from me.  What a commentary on my relationship to Kristie that, as I sit here remembering, the ache of both memories is the same.  How can my first born and my oldest friend have lives, experiences, relationships—that don’t include me?  It’s almost like a tiny, immature part of me thinks they cease to exist when they aren’t with me.  Of course intellectually this is absurd (and more than a little self centered) but my body and my heart don’t care what my brain wants to think.  That’s how close to my heart, how viscerally connected I feel to Kristie.  The only analogy I can draw on is the bond between mother and child.   

This is not to say that our relationship has been comprised only of giggling over milkshakes and Hallmark greeting card sentiments.  The ones we love the most can hurt us the most, and we’ve cut one another deeply over our 40 plus years together.  We are significantly different people and just because we know fairly intimately all the “me’s” we’ve each been, doesn’t mean those girls and women have always been wildly compatible. 
 

We both started as high achieving eldest children (though, interestingly, when we first stumbled upon the birth order theories, Kristie once commented that she shared many characteristics of a second/middle child—she postulated because of our extremely close relationship and my dominating big sister tendencies towards all my little siblings and, I guess, cousins.  What can I say?  I’m protective.  And bossy).  We were both bookish and imaginative.  We were both cautiously adventurous.  We loved poring through the woods and cornfields surrounding our homes and grandparents’ farm, though we never went far enough to get lost or tried anything that would really have gotten us hurt (save one very memorable bike crash when we attempted the massive hill in her backyard, my hands on the streamered handlebars, hers wrapped around me from behind on her pink banana seat bike.  Mine was yellow, by the way, and must have been at my house since we had to ride double.  We wore, in fact owned, no helmets of course—this was approximately 1983).  We watched the same shows and listened to the same music.  I think our first album was the same (either Paula Abdul or Debbie Gibson), but maybe not.  Her dad introduced us to Crystal Gale (“Don’t it make my brown eyes blue?” Was our shared theme song), and my dad introduced us to Y basketball.  Her mom French braided our hair and my mom made us take naps and eat organic peanut butter “fudge”.

But as high school approached, our shared interests began to diverge.  I had stuck with basketball when she gave it up around middle school, she stuck with diving which I gave up around the same time.  Our interest in music started to change—I gravitated toward hip hop (“Busta move” was the theme song of my high school basketball career) and she towards more alternative choices (we both loved The Cure’s “Letter to Elise” though that was the only one I liked and she enjoyed their whole album).  We were hormone addled, stupid teens and we fought—both struggling to define our identities and space in a world we couldn’t know back then was more than big enough for both of us.

In my mid-twenties, I met and married Chad.  Kristie was my most loyal (only local) bridesmaid who made the 45 minute trek between where we lived then multiple times to help emboss silver stars onto our wedding invitations and programs.  She cared for our oldest child when I went to the hospital to have my second, and remains a beloved “auntie” to that sweet blue eyed baby girl who turned 17 just eleven days ago.   

Our lives sped forward from there, Chad and I adding more babies at breakneck speed, and she building her career across multiple companies—venturing far and wide through travel jobs and personal travel (she spent a memorable month in India around the same time I was planning my second—or was it third?—maternity leave).  Though we had started to diverge in high school, the gap widened as I was consumed by the early years of motherhood and she was—do I even know?  I was so consumed by my own life that I lost track.  From afar, I envied her the freedom and the travel.  The unabashed pursuit of ever more exciting career opportunities.  The creation of a lovely home utterly reflective of her tastes and personality.  My home is a hodgepodge of tastes—the awkward melding of Chad and my preferences molded around the wash-and-wear practicality of a big, active, slightly (slightly?) messy family.  Our lives, which had seemed so utterly parallel at the beginning, were shifting.  In a novel I read recently, a character described the impact of such a small shift in course early on.  “If you nudge an asteroid off course by just a tiny bit and give it enough time, it will end up in an entirely different place.  Life is no different.  Nudge someone one way or the next and a person’s life trajectory can change forever.”  From The Perfect Comeback of Caroline Jacobs.  This was us, I guess.  I remember once journaling how the divide between child-free and parent was so wide as to feel nearly impossible to communicate across.  I don’t know this for certain, but I bet I was talking about Kristie.  It was strange and difficult to navigate such an impactful phase of life without her.

What is interesting, though, and not entirely in keeping with the asteroid metaphor, is that as the years pass, it feels as if we are drawing back together again.  In my first post I mentioned the hours I had spent in the company of “wise and funny and similarly slightly rueful” and the first one that came to mind was a recent hour spent at her lovely home in Des Moines, sipping good red wine, over a fancy fireplace contraption she had recently treated herself to.  The time I spent with Kristie—back to baring our souls and wrestling life’s deepest challenges, using our shared language and history to finish each other’s sentences, or to not bother finishing them at all—centered and comforted me in a way nothing else can.  She is my touchstone and my safe harbor and my oldest, dearest, most beloved friend.  I hesitated over the “most beloved” because I have a lot of beloved friends—and she has even more.  But what my soul whispered in that brief moment was that if someone is so fundamentally resident in your heart and life that there are memories and moments where you can barely distinguish her experience from yours, who feels as much like “coming home” as anyone else in your life, “most beloved” doesn’t even begin to touch it.

Happy birthday dear, dear, friend of my heart.  The intertwining of our lives is a blessing for which I’ll forever be grateful.  I can’t wait for our adventures in the next 44.  To start, how about we play house or go swimming?