If time was measured in footsteps, walking together with my friend could go for days on end.
~Author Unknown
Two good friends, talking about everything and nothing on our morning walks. It might start off like this: “Did you see the moon?”
“No, where is it?”
“Just above the bridge.”
“Wow! Hey, I saw a great movie last night.”
“Oh, yeah? Who was in it?”
“That English guy, you know — dark hair, tall — he used to be married to what’s-her-name.”
“Well, if I had another hint, maybe…”
For 15 years, give or take, Chris and I met around dawn in front of her house and walked the hills in our Oakland neighborhood. During the school year, when she taught middle-school science and I did college counseling with high-school seniors, we hit the street at 5:45 a.m. — every day, rain or shine. With her dog Eddie in tow, we walked and talked as the stars faded and the sun came up.
Our daily up-and-downhill chats covered years of drama, trauma, joys and triumphs. Our kids were a frequent topic as they navigated their way through school, driving, romance, college and young adulthood. Although we proudly shared their moments of glory, we unabashedly shared all the boneheaded things they did, too: lost keys and jackets, missed curfews and airplanes, blown deadlines, dents in the car, and so forth.
We spoke in the kind of shorthand that good friends develop, and often finished each other’s sentences in a way that is never considered rude or obnoxious, as it might be if, say, our husbands did it. After all those years, we knew each other’s cast of characters and their back stories. I knew her students, colleagues and family — and she knew mine. Sometimes, a storyline ran for weeks, while some episodes were one-shot “can you believe what happened?” vignettes. There was the time I attempted a home-repair job that nearly caused my garage door to fall down. And then there was the day her classroom’s pet mouse escaped from its cage. Chris took this as a “teachable moment” and had the kids brainstorm the best way to lure little Ralph back into captivity.
“You should write about this,” I said to her.
“You write it,” she shot back. “You’re the writer.”
Our friendship has a unique twist: We were born on the exact same November day in the city of San Francisco. Minor details aside (her large Catholic family as opposed to my small Jewish one), we are the same height, have blue-green eyes, and our curly hair has more salt than pepper in it these days. We are like twins, without the baggage of having grown up together. Other people find it amusing when one of us asks the other, “How old are we?” or “How tall are we?” But that’s just the way it is with us.
During our walks, we listened patiently to each other, huffing up hills while we worked out thorny family problems and talked ourselves into leaving jobs when it was time to move on. We kept each other grounded; we relied on each other to start each new day with a few laughs, some good advice and a willing ear. Perhaps Chris’s mind sometimes wandered to lesson plans or field trips during one of my rambling stories, but she would always be right there with an appropriate response when I came up for air. One day, I asked Chris to tell me to shut up if she was tired of hearing me vent on a particularly vexing subject. She waited a beat, and then said, “Okay. Shut up.” It was just the right thing to say. Of course, she asked me to do the same for her, but I never felt the need.
We could always interrupt each other to point out signs of the changing seasons: the shifting position of the constellations, the ripening of persimmons or blackberries, the first blossoms on the tulip magnolias. At the highest point of our walk, we would often pause and take in the vista that included the Bay, the bridges, Lake Merritt and Mount Tamalpais. “Aren’t we lucky to live here?” we would ask each other. We would literally stop and smell the roses. At the walk’s end, I would head up the block to my house, saying “See you tomorrow!” over my shoulder as she climbed up her stairs.
Even though I’d known for months that Chris was leaving the neighborhood, leaving the state, leaving me without a walking partner — the day the big orange-and-white moving van pulled up in front of her house, I felt a wave of sadness.
Chris moved on to challenge herself personally and professionally in graduate school — a dream come true. I had encouraged her to search for an educational opportunity that would allow her to broaden her skills and share her gifts with others. Now she’d gone and done it. What was I thinking?
Since she left, my whole rhythm is off. As I told her through my tears that morning in front of the damn moving van, I’m only sorry for myself — though I suspect she will miss our routine and me, too.
During the everyday-ness of our walks, I didn’t really think about what our friendship meant to me. I think about it a lot now. It isn’t just the ridiculous souvenir tea towels we gave each other, or the things we borrowed (everything from the standard eggs and garlic to a vacuum cleaner and long black gloves). It isn’t the mornings we got soaked to the skin by a sudden downpour, the disagreements about whether we were walking south or southwest, the sampled blackberries at the end of our walk — or not being able to wait until 6:00 a.m. to share a piece of good news. It isn’t just about having suffered losses and surviving them together.
We are not sappy and sentimental, either of us. We’re just a pair of tough cookies with a secret gooey center. But with our lifeline thinned to e-mail and an occasional phone call, I feel the loss of contact deeply, and I know Chris does, too. Maybe a friendship like ours becomes like its central characters — living and growing and gaining strength when its limits are stretched and tested the most.
There’s one thing I know for sure, though: I miss those morning walks.
— Risa Nye —