Best Friends

The biggest compliment you could give another kid was making them your Best Friend. Some kids liked it so much they had two or three. Sort of like cheating on their spouses openly. Then there would eventually be a fight about who got to be the Best Friend despite the fact that nobody particularly liked each other at that moment. It was fight for property title, like land barons. But, in the end, you usually went back to the Best Best Friend after the ego got sorted out.  Because you may have wanted to adoration of many, but you couldn't sing the lyrics to the themes to the Saturday Morning Cartoon shows the same and confide about the funny smells coming out of your sister with just anyone. There was history there.

As an adult, it is a rare and beautiful thing, a Best Friend. Usually if you are married, it is your spouse because nothing screams "Best Friend!" louder than marriage vows saying that you will honor them regardless of their quirks.  But being this kind of  Best Friend gets complicated sometimes with Partner, Co-Parent and Sex Buddy. Most other types of Best Friends don't live on top of each other and have to pay bills with each other. Marital problems tend to lose the Best Friend part when you need to get the rest of the parts straightened out. You can tell because the spouse tends to treat the other category of Best Friends better than you because you are at that moment no longer a Best Friend. You are The Cause Of Angst.  The Best Friend is in there but its like if your Best Friend joined the little league on the enemy team  and you had to wait till summer to get over to remember that you both had a undying mutual passion for Marvel Comics and all of the good things you have done before together, all the discoveries and marvelous stories you made. So having another type of Best Friend.... one that you are not legally bound to....is a huge blessing.

 I have a non-spousal Best Friend even though I don't get to talk to her as much as we used to and we don't announce the title when we refer to each other. When things were easier and men folks and children folks didn't dilute our schedules, we would talk on the phone every night. I miss that. It was a regular thing that we did because we could. We don't say Best Friends but she is that person whom I can talk to on the phone for an hour and a half at one in the morning after not speaking for two weeks and not even blink. We've been doing it for twenty years. We've been through comedy and births and husbands and, lately, deaths. She harbors me when things get really bad and is the person that I call as soon as I get something great.  And vice versa in return.  I miss seeing her but she's out there. I know when I'm dead, she's the non-relative person who will take it the hardest. We accept who we are are, warts and all. Although sometimes if the warts get too ugly, sometimes we have to back off a little. It is what it is and a history of this many good times is awfully hard to erase.

I wish I could be a kid Best Friend again. The kind that can hang out for hours on a rock in the woods talking about the important things in the world like moss and The Flintstones and why her brother is being such an asshole....almost always puberty....and what exactly is puberty anyway.  The kind of Best Friend without bills and with four hours to kill just goofing around. But I guess a kid Best Friend can't drive a car to go pick up the Best Friend from the bus when they decide to visit. And order chicken fingers whenever they want when they decide to  Best Friend binge eat together while they talk about boys, falling into the blissful Early Adulthood Best Friend pattern developed so long ago. And watch old videos of each other together learning cool things about life. I guess, when its good, its something to appreciate, hold onto while you have it. And be confident that when the Best Friends fade out with whatever circumstance life has handed you together, they come back again like they have again and again, because a Best Friend is a rare and wonderful thing.