Friday, July 13th, 2007The events of July 10 and 11 were surreal. On Tuesday morning, my friend Missy showed up at my home at 7:13AM. That was the first time I'd seen her since July, 1981. As she put it later, "It's like we blinked and here we are."
We drove to BWI airport to pick up Chris, who was due to arrive about 45 minutes later.
At the airport, we checked the arrivals board and then went our separate ways. I waited outside of the security area for Chris to show up while Missy waited by AirTran baggage carousel #13 downstairs.
As soon as Chris got off the plane, I snapped a (blurry) photo and we hugged. As we walked downstairs we were both saying we couldn't wait to see Missy later in the day. Chris had no idea that Missy had come with me. As we got closer to baggage, I could see Missy sitting on a bench facing away from us. I was talking and laughing loudly to make sure she heard us. Chris started to head toward the carousel on the side Missy was facing, and I said, "Let's go this way instead." I saw her ogling the back of Missy's head.
On the bench, just opposite Missy's back, I suggested we sit. Again, Chris was looking at the back of Missy's head. (Later, we came to find out she was thinking, "I'll bet that's how Missy's hair looks now.") She just wouldn't turn away, even though I tried to divert her attention. Missy had a line about a moped all set to say to Chris, but she never got a chance. She gave up and turned around. Chris screamed (of course) and they hugged for a long, long time. When they parted, both were in tears. Surprise!
Chris had the infamous Chris Book with her and pulled it out right there in the airport--she didn't trust checking this priceless work of literature in her baggage. (See http://susie-nyc.blogspot.com/2007/06/to-timeshare-and-beyond.html post for an explanation of The Chris Book.)
After everyone stopped crying and Chris retrieved her luggage, we went back to my house and got caught up on our lives. On the way out of airport parking I stopped to pay the attendant. Chris leaned over me in the car and proclaimed loudly to the attendant, "We haven't seen each other in 26 years!!!" I've never seen a parking attendant smile as big as this guy did. She probably made his day.
Missy was the only one of the three of us who had led a fairly normal life after high school - she graduated from college, dated a guy she met in college, went to work as a Science teacher, got married, had three kids, and now spends her spare time making props and costumes for her daughters' dance troups, going to little league games and dance recitals, and taking a family vacation to Sunset Beach every other year.
Chris and I both led much more spastic lives. (Missy was like, "How does someone stay married for only 10 months??") But we won't go into all the sordid details here. :) Let's just say that both Chris and Missy hadn't changed a bit in my eyes, and I'm very happy to say that both are quite content with their lives. Each has had a wonderful family of their own and a happy marriage for the past 18-22 years, and that is the best news of all.
We stayed up late that night talking. All three of us had been up since long before dawn that day, so we were exhausted. Plus it was a pretty emotional day, which made us even more tired.
On Wednesday Missy had to leave around lunchtime for a job interview, so Chris and I decided to go into Baltimore's Inner Harbor. (She got the job - yay!) Missy's husband had taken the day off work and was also at the harbor with the kids and their cousins. We still hadn't met her family yet.
Chris and I went to the aquarium, which was awesome. I especially loved the dolphin show, entitled "Play!" I could easily go back and see that again. It's amazing what those animals can do - and they were having fun doing it. Dolphins are so playful - they are such a joy to observe.
After that we got a hold of Missy and decided we'd have dinner at the Cheesecake Factory downtown instead of the one in Columbia near my house. Missy mentioned that the rest of her family was still at the harbor, in the Science Center.
Chris and I had to walk back to the car first and move it from 2-hour parking. As we headed around the harbor, we had planned on stopping in at the gift shop at the Science Center to see if Missy's family was still there, although we figured they were probably long gone by then. As we were walking across the red brick pavement along the harbor, a man and five children passed us on our left. I looked over at the man and thought it might be Missy's husband, Rich (who went by "Simon" in college - don't ask). It was tough to tell if it was him because he had sunglasses on, and I'd only seen a photo of him. I told Chris I thought that was him. She was like, "No way, man." But I didn't want to miss the chance in case it was him, so I took the risk of calling to him: "Simon?" He kept walking. I stopped, turned back and yelled more firmly, "Simon!" but the man kept walking. His son Derek heard me, though, and called, "Dad!"
It was Missy's husband! Sure enough, we'd bumped into Missy's family. What a small world! It was a hoot. Rich wanted to take our picture, but his camera battery had died, so he offered to take one with my camera. So before Missy even knew it, we were photographed with her family.
When Missy met up with us at the restaurant, we were telling her about how cool the dolphin show was at the aquarium. I pulled out my camera and offered to show her a really neat photo from the show - what I showed her was the photo of Chris and I standing there with her kids! She died laughing. Chris asked our waitress to take our picture (after, of course, animatedly exclaiming, "We haven't seen each other in 26 years!!!"), and that photo came out just great - so good that I posted it at the top of this blog entry.
We were all full of cheesecake and dinner, so we just strolled around the mall there at Inner Harbor. The moment I laid eyes on a photo booth I screamed, "Oh my god - we have to do this!!" The last time we'd been in a photo booth was 1980 - it was when we were at the beach together. Man those things have shrunk. The seat was only big enough for two (small) people, so Chris had to sit on my lap. Then the camera looked like it was pointed up too high as the machine told us to maneuver ourselves into an oval outline that we just couldn't reach from our seated positions. Not to mention, the image we were looking at was backwards, so if you thought you needed to move your head left to fit in the picture, you really needed to move it to the right.
So the whole thing was a struggle. Every time the machine would count down to snap the next shot, we weren't ready, and that made us laugh. The problem was, we couldn't stop laughing. Missy grabbed my head and tried to push it into the correct position, but I kept moving it the wrong way based on the mirror image on the screen in front of us. We laughed so hard that our stomachs (already hurting from the cheesecake) were in severe pain. When we tumbled out of there, tears in our eyes from laughing so hard, this small girl was staring up at us wondering what was wrong with these old women. We just couldn't stop laughing. It was hysterical - so much fun that we got back in and did it again.
One neat store, called "Fire and Ice," had tons of glass items and some gorgeous jewelry. Chris walked up to the lady behind the counter and screamed, "We haven't seen each other in 26 years!!!" She proceeded to tell this kindly woman that Missy 
hadn't changed a bit and, "Oh my god, I have photos - want to see them?!" Next thing you know, Chris pulled a stack of very old photos out of her purse and this poor woman was being forced to look at our "before" photos. (I honestly think it was probably the most fun she had all day.)
We spent the rest of the evening on the big sectional sofa at Missy's house, the whole family watching videos of her two daughters (Natalie and Kendall) dancing. It was really fun. Missy's family is obviously a close-knit bunch. They laugh a lot together. And her teenage son Derek never complained once about watching the videos. In fact, he enjoyed it with the rest of us.
With so much love in that house, it was hard to leave. But it was after 11pm and we were still going on little sleep, so Chris and I went home to my place. The next morning I drove her to BWI and hugged her for a long time before letting her go check in at ticketing. We both cried.
What a wonderful reunion that was. A good friend is a forever friend, they say. And it's true. I've made a lot of friends over the years, but there are few that are as special as these two. And I know in my heart that they'll always be there for me. One of the things Missy and I wrote in The Chris Book in 1980 was that we'd always be friends--a promise we've officially kept.
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