291 Days Until the Big Five-O

People Let Me tell you about My Best Friend

Remember the theme song from the old Television show “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” with Bill Bixby and that adorable little boy with the black hair?? Whatever happened to him? Did he end up like so many childhood actors, drugged, depressed and looking for a second chance in Rehab or on some Cable Television show? I hope not.

The world really has changed from when I once sang along with that catchy tune…”People Let Me Tell you about my best friend” once a week. The song referred to a father and son, but my best friend is someone I met on the way to Kindergarten, which brings me to topic of this particular post.

Sharing a Soul…

I have decided we do not necessarily have “soul-mates” as much as we have “shared souls” wandering the world. The difference is critical, to me at least. A “soul-mate” infers finding that special ONE person you either marry or feel a connection to on a very deep level. Yet, I think our souls go way beyond being pieces of a big puzzle looking to fit in with 3 or 4 other pieces cut out so they interlock perfectly to form a bigger piece of the puzzle. I am beginning to think life is not a puzzle at all. We may never ever figure out the big picture. The goal is not to find the mate(s) for your soul, the goal is to find the souls sharing the same molecular structure so each soul can simply expand on its own. It remains a nebulous entity defying explanation, or visualization.

I share a soul with my mother, and my best friend. I am convinced we are all cut from the same nebulae in the heavenly invisible Quilt sewn by the force of nature most of us call G-D. As we have traveled through life together my best friend and I have not just “shared” experiences like living together in college or making phony phone calls all afternoon while in grammar school (and in college too). Yes, we laugh at all the same things (actually we are usually the only two people laughing). But somehow, even where our lives diverge:

Different Parents, and therefore different siblings.
We live in different suburbs now
She married young, and had children way before I ever even got married, let alone reproduced.
She is the oldest of 2 and I am the youngest of 3
She is good in math and I can barely add and subtract.

So how is it we both have had to deal with parents who were much older than everyone else’s parents while we were growing up. And our kids (hers are 21 and 19, mine are 11 and 13) seem so much alike and they run into so many of the same exact “issues” you would think they shared the same parents. We both have cousins with many challenges (mental, physical) even though mine our “first” cousins with no parents and hers are second or third cousins whose parents are still alive. We have sister-in-laws who are so identical to one another I am convinced they were separated at birth.

No matter how much our lives diverge over the last 4 and a half decades, they seem to converge even more. So what is that if it is not a shared soul? There are simply too many coincidences between us for it to be a coincidence that we met on the way to kindergarten, which it self was a strange coincidence. You see, my last name started with a K and hers with an S. We were not “supposed” to be going to kindergarten at the same time. Kids with last names starting with A to M were supposed to go in the morning for the first half of the year and then in the afternoon for the second half of the year while kids with last names starting with N to Z were on the opposite schedule. They started the year out going in the afternoon and then finished it by going in the morning. But my “best friend” had just moved into the neighborhood and when her parents registered her she was put with the A to M crowd even though she was an S because that group already had too many kids in it. So, there we were strolling down Rosemont at the same time every morning. We walked and talked, our mothers trailing behind us. We had no idea how profound that picture would become in both our lives, us, walking and talking, and our mothers always behind us, except now it seems more like we are pulling them along on the invisible Wagons we all carry loaded with life’s responsibilities, obligations and emotional treasures.