Best Friends

My sister called me her best friend in an email today. Huh? All through our growing-up years, we fought like...well...like sisters! When I look back, I wonder how our mother tolerated us! In the back seat of our un-air-conditioned vehicle, traveling across country to meet a ship that would take us overseas with the Navy, we griped at each other. I can remember having an imaginary line between our seats, and if even so much as the edge of her skirt was on my side, I was livid! (Kind of reminds me of the "He's touching me" commercial of a couple of years ago...where a brother pretends to touch his protesting sibling. Annoying!) One time, when we were waaay old enough to know better, we got into a knock-down drag-out physical fight in the absence of our parents. When Mom found out, we both got a tongue-lashing. I think it was the first time in my life that Mom expressed disappointment in me...and honestly, the experience scared me. Of course, it was Shari's fault! I think I might have been in 6th grade...





Soon after, Shari left home to start her adult life in the Danville, IL, area. I was still finding my own in Oak Park. Or trying to.





I think of best friends as being confidantes...people who are there for you, no matter what. My life was not parallel to Shari's. She was married and had children long before I did. Choices she made were not necessarily choices I would have made, and vice versa. I had long told myself that my daughter was my best friend in the same tradition of my mother and me...until that bond was broken for a time. I was shaken. My mother was gone. I had no one to blubber to...except my sister. We had already endured the heartbreak of losing our brother in an unacceptable situation of estrangement. Our glue--parents and grandparents were all dead. All Shari and I had in common was our heritage as Covill/Armstrong women: damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!