Rare Friendships: Coming Home

Yeudi and me

Photo: Jim Burke

Yeudi did the impossible.  She got me to leave town to see her.  At a chicken farm.

O.K. not ON the chicken farm but close enough.

It wasn't just the allure of meeting a real chicken that did it.  It was knowing it had been years and years and years, maybe even decades since she had been fed real food.  

O.K. maybe she had good food but not real food.  If you don't eat whitefish salad or bagels or chopped liver or lox or bialies you become malnourished and forget your name. 

Besides, it had been years and years and years, maybe even decades since we could talk and laugh that laugh that makes stuff come out of your nose.

That's how we talked and laughed when we were baby girls surviving fist fights in the schoolyards of P.S. 110 and J.H.S. 56, or keeping our heads above water inside the walls of our homes, or attempting to stay alive as we tiptoed through the social minefield of the High School of Performing Arts or bumbled through adulthood when we, almost too young to be on our own, lived as roommates.

Nowadays we don't have bullies or pretty girls making our lives hell.   There are other things that encourage a long walk off a short pier.

 the Mariner, Jim and Yeudi cracking up about something

while Dottie hopes for food

These are different days, years and years and years, maybe even decades later.  Somehow Yeudi and me, born a week apart, got husbands and almost-husbands (me) born a bit more than a week apart and when we all sit down to eat real food we laugh and laugh and laugh until we are about to become little snot fountains, (We're all adults now so we can stop before it gets messy).

But in between all that, Yeudi, who holds many memories of those long-ago-days, tells me our stories.  My brain, such a sieve, I startle at her recounting and attempt to coax those times out from the fog that saved me then but has now left me without our history.

Still, these are such different days, years and years and years, maybe even decades later.  We no longer have to keep faces tough, backs straight and fists ready, at least not the way we used to.

Instead, with every word and memory, we get to come home to the heart and soul we always had when we were baby girls on tougher streets than the ones we live on now.

**
Related Posts:

Sunday Memories Of An Encore On Rare Friendships: Yeudi

Sunday Memories:  Along Came Bialy

Sunday Memories Encore: Matthew 26:52

Sunday Memories Of High School Stairs

Sunday Memories: Moving Day

In Case Of Emergency

They Don't Have Real Food Where She Lives