Reconnecting
Livingston had two junior high schools that divvied up the town down the middle. All the kids on one side of town went to Heritage Junior High, near me, and the other half went to Mt. Pleasant Junior High, where Cindy and the rest of the lunch table did their 7th, 8th, and 9th grades. The high school brought the two sides of the town together and the challenge was for the population from the two lower schools to merge into one senior high student body.
Cindy introduced me to her friends: Jill, Sharon, Hope, Ruthann, and Amy. I had some friends from my junior high (classmates I’d known since elementary school), but I was eager to make some new connections in this larger pool of teenagers. I was a rather shy girl, and not entirely comfortable jumping into new friendships. The English class that morning was the ice breaker, so we were on common ground.
The more we got to know each other, the more commonalities we learned. We both were Jewish, raised in traditional Jewish households (Cindy’s more Orthodox than my Conservative upbringing). Our fathers, who were both from Czechoslovokia, had fled persecution during World War II, and spoke English with a mishmash accent with hints of Czech, German, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Our mothers both spoke French (Cindy’s mother was born in France; my mother was a high school French teacher and spoke fluently). We each had one sibling: a brother (hers slightly older, and mine slightly younger). We were both smart young women (although a little nerdy), empowered, and ready to take on high school. Could we?
One snowy day that first winter, Cindy’s mom offered me a ride home from school. Livingston is full of steep hills and the route from the high school to my house was mostly uphill. We got as far as the top of Edgemere Road that led to my street, Scotland Drive, when she stopped the car. The road would careen downhill another quarter mile to my house and Cindy’s mom was afraid the car would skid and spin. She told me, in her lovely French accent, “That hill is too steep. You’ll have to walk the rest of the way.” Down the hill, in a snowstorm! I was in the backseat of the car, and Cindy turned around and looked at me sympathetically as I opened the door. Somehow, that moment cemented our friendship, and Cindy and I were friends for life.
Through our high school years, we studied Shakespeare, enacting scenes with our schoolmates (and sometimes re-enacting Shakespeare silliness outside of school), and shared classrooms for French, psychology, poetry, and writing. We spent time at each other’s houses, so I got to know Cindy’s parents, and she knew mine. In our senior year, we joined the yearbook staff and put the book together for our classmates. We graduated high school in the spring of 1979, and we both got accepted to George Washington University in Washington, D.C. It made going away from home an easy transition, because my close friend, Cindy was also a freshman, even though we were pursuing different curriculum towards our respective majors. Mine was drama and communications, and hers was science since she wanted to go into nursing. Cindy transferred to New York University after our first year, and then would continue in a nursing program. I stayed at GWU, and returned to New Jersey after I graduated, and then worked in New York City, commuting back and forth.
Cindy met her future husband, Matt, shortly after finishing her nursing degree and they got married in our town. Then they moved to a community outside of Philadelphia, where Matt had grown up. Cindy’s parents remained at their house in Livingston. Cindy and Matt had three kids and I met them when the couple would bring them back to Livingston to visit the grandparents. I’d travel to Pennsylvania for visits as well.
When my father died in 1990, I fell into a major depression and essentially pushed people away as I tried to navigate the grief and pain from losing him. I didn’t see my friends for years, and Cindy and I lost touch for a while.
I credit the invention of Facebook for reuniting us, and rekindling our friendship. I’d already become a long distance runner, and mapped our town on my daily training runs. On Saturdays, at the intersection of Hillside and Mount Pleasant Avenues, I’d always bump into Cindy’s father walking either on his way to, or home from the Orthodox shul her parent’s belonged to. He was getting on in years, and although I’d stop and say hello, I wasn’t sure he remembered who I was.
One day, he recognized me with a nod, and spoke cryptically, “My grandson just had a son.” “Oh, really,” I verbally nodded, unsure of what he meant. I had to find out! I “friended” Cindy on Facebook, and sent her a message. “Your dad told me your son had a son, is this true? Are you a grandmother?”
“No,” she replied, a bit annoyed and confounded. “My son is 20; my dad is 91 and senile.” “Oh,” I said. “So…how are you. What have you been up to?”
We were reconnecting slowly, sharing stories, photos, and ideas. But we still hadn’t seen each other in more than 25 years.
In early spring, 2018, my mother was dying. She’d had cancer that had been in remission twice, but this time it came back more aggressive than ten years earlier when she was younger and stronger.
I was still running as my fitness coping mechanism, and traveling along Hillside Avenue, a familiar hilly route I’d been on thousands of times before. I was with a friend, Dmitri, and we were chatting as we ran, nattering on about the vacation he and his wife were planning, our training miles, or maybe just about the weather. A car stopped, and the driver rolled down the window.
“Hey, stranger,” she said. I looked up, and there was Cindy. “Oh my God,” I cried out, stopping in my tracks, and moving over to her open window. I introduced Dmitri, who wisely assumed I’d be stationary for a while, and waved off to continue his run. Incredulously, Cindy told me she’d been traveling this same route every Wednesday for the past several years, driving from her home outside Philly, making her way through Livingston’s myriad streets, and up Hillside Avenue to her parents’ house on Fawn Drive – just over the top of the hill.
We’d never seen each other on this road until this serendipitous moment.
We exchanged cell phone numbers to make sure we could get in touch. And that began our reconnected, rekindled friendship. We had a lot of catching up to do, but it felt comfortable and familiar. We told our stories, filling in the gaps, shared fears about our aging parents, and their declining health. We reminisced about our schoolmates and friends and made up for lost time. I was with my mother in the hospital during the last two months of her life, and Cindy was my sounding board and compassionate support – I had no one else; my brother lived across the country and was no help.
My mother died that April, and afterwards I moved to California, thinking being near my brother and his family would be some comfort as I faced a life without my mother. Cindy’s parents held on a few more years, but she lost them one at a time. We comforted each other as we buried our parents, and dealt with the aftermaths of their deaths, and the complex grief of essentially being orphans – even as adults.
We’ve continued to talk to each other from week to week, our friendship deeper now as we are older, life less certain, and more complicated. I’m grateful for our sisterhood that began when we were teenagers, and our re-connection that began on a long road home.
I miss my friend.
I think I’ll give her a call.
