Old Friends, New Friends

When I moved to Miami, I made one friend, Mary.

Everyone else was a friendly aquaintance, a work buddy or a friend-in-law. Mary and I met at a dinner party designed to introduce me to a different potential friend, but that person brought Mary and we clicked. Turns out we lived a block away from each other on South Beach. For the next few weeks, we started bumping into each other often. I wonder if our paths had always crossed, but because we didn’t know each other, we were unaware of our overlapping orbits? We became fast pals, inviting each other over for dinner, lounging over iced teas in sidewalk cafes, counseling each other’s woes and dancing in impossibly high heels.

And then came love.

I got engaged. She fell hard for a guy who lived 3,000 miles. I got married. She moved, then got married. I had babies. She had a baby. She could have easily become a friend whom I wished well, but eventually relegated to a Christmas card list. That’s the thing about starting your own family; it fills up your entire life. Everything superflous and extraneous disappears. When it’s hard to squeeze a shower into everyday, making a long-distance phone call just to chat in unlikely.

But we did.

Every few weeks, we spoke. We kept in touch. In touch. Think about that phrase. It’s such a beautiful way to feel about someone whom you love, but cannot see. In touch. Sometimes I wondered how our friendship would survive, considering our distance and limited history? We both live far from our families, so vacations are predetermined destinations to see grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. But sometimes I needed to hear her particular view of a situation or wanted to share the astonishment of motherhood. So we remained in touch.

Mary came to visit a few days ago, hubby and baby in tow. It was the first time I met her impossibly blue-eyed son, Diego. Within minutes we were all on the living room floor and it felt as natural as family. When my babies woke up from their naps, they got to meet Diego. Max had been particularly excited about a baby coming to our house. Earlier in the day he had asked me if Diego had any trucks. I answered no. Would he share his?

“Yes,” and after a thoughtful pause, “We need to buy him some trucks.”

Diego is a very social baby and the children were equally fascinated by and fascinating to each other. It was one of the first times my children played the bigger kids. I saw Max take the initiative to make a new friend. It’s a milestone left out of baby books, but somehow more precious than a first tooth. First friends. It’s the first time they met a baby of a friend of mine dating back to pre-baby days, someone who knows me apart from my role as a mother. I swooned a bit and remembered when Mary and I had yet to cross the thresholds of thirty, of marriage, of motherhood and we used to fantasize about sitting in the same cafes with strollers by our sides.

So, like the playground song tells us: