Thank you for being a friend

Thanksgiving is next week. As I look at the blessings in my life, it’s a precious friendship that sparkles with extra brightness. Kathleen and I became friends nearly 30 years ago, and no one knows me like she does. She’s my BFF, as the young’uns text-message each other these days.

We met in fourth grade at Lakeshore Elementary School in Rochester, New York, long before the days of text messaging and cell phones. (That's Kathleen on the left, me on the right.) Both of us were assigned to the Delphi program, an experimental educational model at that time. We quickly became inseparable and were fortunate to be in the same class for three years. We spent an awful lot of time “socializing” as our teachers would say, yet for a good portion of those three years, we were seated near each other in class. Our sixth-grade teacher became so frustrated with our constant conversation that he told us we could talk in class only if we used sign language. So we learned the sign alphabet and continued to chat away.

As fate and school assignment plans would have it, we went to separate schools after sixth grade. We lost touch with each other and developed other friendships. We went to college, and grad school. She went to France, where she found her husband; I moved to Boston where mine found me. We settled into our own lives and our friendship, once so vibrant, lay dormant for more than 20 years.

A Delphi reunion brought us back in touch a few years ago, and now we’re as inseparable as ever – as much as friends living in Massachusetts and Texas can be inseparable. We email each other daily and chat on the phone a couple of times a week. Despite our separate lives, we still have a lot in common: we’re both teachers (she teaches French; I teach music), we have the same quirky sense of humor, and, most improbably, we both have children with autism. Her Patrick is 7 years old and my Abby is 6; Kathleen is planning their wedding already. When she gets too exuberant, I remind her that we need to get them to make eye contact first. (They’ll have lots of opportunity to practice when Abby and I fly to Houston in January.)

Kathleen inspires me with her single-minded dedication to Patrick’s success. Most evenings will find her making flashcards to help him study, or running him to therapy, or planning a social activity for him and his younger brother. How she does so much for him while balancing the demands of a full-time job and making time for her marriage and herself is beyond me. To top it off, she does all this in French and English, and her children are bilingual, so they can converse with her in-laws on their biannual trips to France.

Inspiration aside, Kathleen and I know each other so well from having spent three of our formative years together. We were both violinists – she very accomplished, me less so – and many of our extracurricular activities centered on music, including the orchestra her violist father founded and directed. So there’s the musician thing, and the Delphi thing, and the Rochester thing, in addition to the autism thing, that binds us across the years.

Today is Kathleen’s birthday, but her friendship is a gift to me, every day. So happy birthday, to my one, best friend, from 1978 to now.

Kathleen and I at the Delphi reunion, May 2006