Taking Notes

I was sick yesterday, which is why I didn't write. I am still not feeling 100%--we have been passing around a nasty stomach flu here at our otherwise island idyll--and yesterday was my turn. As it was only the second day I'd missed, the first being the day we arrived before we had internet access, I made an executive decision that partial recovery was not a sufficient excuse to skip another. As I've said before, this would be a very slippery slope for me. Remember my subtitle? Seven Days a Week. Although lying on the floor in a cold sweat while dry heaving is a legitimate excuse for a missed day. Too much information. Sorry.

Because I am still feeling a little light-headed and weak, I am going to allow myself a note-taking format on a bunch of ideas running through my head. None stuck enough to flesh out, but they might on second look or over time. So here goes:

Tonight I was in Lily and Violet's bed, between them, reading Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox. They were rapt; I read an extra chapter, so charmed was I by their raptness. (I think that is the first time in about twenty years I have used the passive voice while writing. Just noting.) But even as I was reading, because this is a book I know well, I was able to let my mind wander, and all I could think about was sitting across from Caitlin, Violet's mother, in seventh grade English class while discussing Inherit the Wind.

It seemed so astonishing to me that these were our children, these two girls, growing longer and wiser almost as I watch them, each possessed of her own singular personality, like us in some ways, and unlike us in others, which I get to observe in this particular case because Caitlin and I have known each other for so long, more than twenty-six years.

This makes me think of many things, in fact. It makes me realize how lucky I am in the friendships I have sustained over time, a surprising number, really. I wonder if this is in part due to my need to be so grounded in my history, so connected to my past. It occurs to me that my father, too, has maintained a number of old friendships, and that he shares this trait of mine: to be connected to the past.

It reminds me of the unusual nature of this particular friendship: mine and Caitlin's. In a funny way, our friendship began, or took off, based on a shared love of language: of reading and writing. Our parents joke that they used to drive us 45 minutes to the other one's house so we could read together. We get the joke, but I think we'd still agree that reading with a great friend in a quiet companionable place is one of the world's best ways to while away an afternoon.

We also started writing together really early. When we were in seventh grade we wrote a satire of the popular Sweet Valley High series called Sweet Wasp High, in honor of the fact that the books eschewed minority characters of all kinds. I am realizing now, writing this, that this friendship may have been my first "grown-up" friendship, in that it was based not on mere proxemics, or membership in the same Campfire Girls troupe or the ability to sing both parts of "Summer Lovin'" from Grease but on a pure intellectual affinity, aligned senses of humor and irony, and shared interests that went beyond, or had no basis in, peer groups or pop culture.

Lily and Violet are too young for that kind of friendship. They enjoy each other's company while bickering constantly, but they are 4 and almost 5. It is too soon to tell if they share a sense of humor that goes beyond nonsense words and underpants on heads. It is too soon to tell if they will develop into the kind of friends who will take notes for each other in Algebra class in a desperate attempt to enliven the subject by constructing crossword puzzles incorporating the terms and poetry written (mercilessly) in the style of innocent classmates.

What they will have, indisputably, is something else. They are already old friends, by definition, and regardless of how their relationship develops over time, they will have known each other all of their lives. I will always remember, and will tell Lily, how I wheeled her to Gramercy Park in March of 2004 when she was 3 months old, to bring Violet a present for her first birthday.

Now, they will probably just remember the afternoon their mothers, still young enough to belt out Bon Jovi ballads in the car but old enough to know how to tend to ailing babies in the middle of the night, took them to the grottoes on Eleuthera. They will, I hope, remember what it felt like to be sitting in a cool, clear pool in the middle of ledges of nearly black porous prehistoric-looking rock, while fish hid on the far side of the smooth white rocks at the bottom of the biggest pool, while waves crashed against the ledges, carving out more grottoes, more pools, to change the landscape for some other family in a thousand years.

They will remember the strawberry ice cream cones they ate in the backseat, that the kind woman in the ice cream shop--shack, really--in Gregory Town told them to press down on the ice cream with their mouths, to press it into the cones. They will remember their new starfish magnets, their white shell necklaces, the way they persisted in bragging about having a window seat in spite of the inherent equality of the situation; they were the only two people in the back seat. They may even remember the feeling of feeling at home with each other, in some indefinable way, simply because of the women they were born to. Old friends. I am so glad for Lily that she will have them too.