The Friends You Keep

I spent last weekend in Brockport, NY visiting my very dear friends, Thad and Jeanne. A lifetime ago, before Thad became a 3rd grade school teacher and took Jeanne and all their earthly belongings back to their childhood home, they were my neighbors in California.

I met them through my ex husband, John. He and Thad were working musicians. Traveling most of the year with Dolly Parton, Mac Davis, the Bellamy Brothers, Rick Nelson...basically anyone who toured and needed a guitar player (John) or a pedal steel player (Thad). We didn't accompany them...except during Christmas when they usually played in Lake Tahoe.

For the most part Jeanne and I were left behind to care for kids, dogs, cats, plumbing, paying bills... just the mudane tasks of keeping a household running. This, in addition to our outside emplyment at Glendale Memorail Hospital (Jeanne) and various advertising agencies (me).

And Jeanne carried me through two marriages, two divorces, three kids (two for me and one acquired from my first husband and his first wife). She even accompanied me into the delivery room when my first daughter (now 28 years old) was born. (John was on the road in Vegas at the MGM Grand at the time.) Both of my kids ate their first solid meal (spaghetti) at Jeanne's kitchen table. Her kids, Jason and Tammy, are older than my kids. So I could go to Jeanne with my fears and questions about raising children. She always gave me sensible advice and seemed to know how to handle any emergency.

Jeanne basically taught me how to be a responsible adult in the world. Something that, until meeting her, I couldn't fathom at all.

Her family became my family. Her mom, Betty, is in her 80's now but has spent her life raising championship german shephards, keeping her horses, painting beautiful portraits (mostly of horses and dogs but she did small ones of my two kids), baking bread and walking in the woods near her massive Victorian era farm house. Her dad, a retired WWII pilot, was my stunt date for dinners out with Thad and Jeanne while John was on the road and I was hugely pregnant. These are people I've been incredibly fortunate to know.

Visiting them is just like being at your mama's house if your mama happens to be a really nurturing, non-judgmental, generous human being who listens well, cooks what you want to eat and accepts you with all your faults laid bare.

I forget sometimes that no matter how long it has been since we've made contact, they are still there for me. No matter what. And thank God for that.