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Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
I am visiting a friend I have known for 68 years. The occasion is not a happy one. She has lost her husband of 55 years, her best friend, and I am here to ease the pain – the little I can – to help sort through things and run everyday errands.
On this day, we are wandering a large and sprawling grocery store that neither of us is familiar with.
Her back is painful; her legs are weak. She moves with her walker and likes to turn it around and sit on its seat. My gait with a cane, after a hip replacement gone bad, is a waddle and a painful limp. One and a half times around the store and we’re both out of gas. The lamb kabobs will have to wait.
At the check-out counter, she sits on her walker while I unload the cart. The cashier is confused. “Is this all one order?”
“I’ll get this,” Barb says, fumbling with credit cards.
“I’ll get the Indian take-out tonight,” I say, adding that I picked up two cans of beer at the LCBO in case she wants it with spicy food. It turns out she doesn’t.
The cashier smiles.
“We’ve been friends since we were seven,” says my friend and flashes her engaging smile.
“Ahh, that’s so nice,” the cashier coos.
“She doesn’t live here in St. Catharines. She came to be with me.”
“Ahh, you two are sooo cute.”
Cute? Us? Again? There was a time when undoubtedly we were cute; cute and precocious. We were eight – my friend likes to make us even younger – when we were plucked from regular classrooms and dropped into an educational experiment designed to launch promising minds in the 1950s.
There we were in a class of 24, cute, little, bright lights – four of whom were named Barbara. We were two of the four who quickly had nicknames to avoid confusion on the playground.
The following year, my family moved to a home two streets from hers. We started to walk the 1 ½ kilometre distance together four times a day, including home for lunch.
We discovered that we had a lot in common. Our parents had gone to the same schools. My uncle and her older brother were friends. We each had an older sister and chaffed at being the youngest.
I liked going to her house where there was shouting and laughter. She liked coming to mine where there was quiet.
I am certain that we were cute in the elementary school choir, in our white shirts, ties and black tunics with long tails. We were cute, but dare-devilish, in winter as we walked home from school on top of large snowbanks. We were cute as we rode our bikes to school.
One day, I had a flat tire; she peddled while I sat on the seat of her bike. But my tunic tail caught in the gears and squeezed tightly. She ran for help from a woman who came with scissors. The woman was my godmother and a neighbour of Barb’s family’s best friends.
I think we were cute when our friendship extended to Saturday jaunts to The Bay in Winnipeg where we’d ogle bone china teacups, commenting on ones that we’d get when we married. Then we’d go to the Paddlewheel cafeteria, for French fries or red velvet cake.
We were certainly cute, if a little odd, when at age 10, we decided to mark Sadie Hawkins Day, as our older sisters had done. We invited two boys from our class to a movie and made giant corsages. They were hugely embarrassed.
We stayed friends through high school and undergraduate years but drifted apart when Barb decided to take her master’s degree in Toronto. Not many years later, in Winnipeg, I was her bridesmaid.
The cuteness was gone.
By then I was seeing some of the world as an Air Canada stewardess. She would see much more with her husband, an academic, studying terrorism. A Christmas letter she sent from Belfast told of their several moves as the fighting grew closer and closer. Excerpts of that letter were published by The Kingston Whig Standard where I was working as a reporter.
We kept in touch through their globe-trotting sabbaticals, her late entry into a PhD program in Washington and her teaching at McMaster University. We kept in touch through my years in Toronto, Winnipeg and Ottawa – babies, nannies, journalism and divorce.
Somehow, as we morphed from our hectic selves with middle-age spread to retirees who are downright chubby, we grew cute together.
“We’ve come full circle, Barb,” I said, as we left the grocery store and slowly, awkwardly headed for the car.
We laughed, as we often have during this time of her bereavement. Our friendship is priceless. We’ve stood alongside each other for 68 years. Cute or not, it is stunning and a very real comfort.
Barbara Robson lives in Ottawa.