Candles on the cake

Yesterday, July 10th, was my birthday and July 12th is my best friend Henrietta's birthday.  Her name isn't really Henrietta, it's Sherri,  but I haven't called her that since we were freshmen in high school. Back then we had both decided that we were destined to become literary giants someday and that to be a good one, giant that is, a memorable pen name was needed.  Her choice was "Henrietta Snodgrass".  We may not have become quite the publisher's darlings that we'd dreamed of being but her name stuck, at least for me it did, and I've called her Henrietta ever since.  She calls me Trixie and I like that just fine.

I believe that one truly has only one "best friend" in their life and that everyone else is called by other adjectives which modify the word friend, i.e., "good, dear, close, closest", you fill in your own blank.  It doesn't even matter if you and that person grow apart, which most best friends from childhood are oft to do, I think that once you've identified them as your "best" that no one can ever have that name again. Henrietta and I went all through grammar school together and we were friends but weren't that particularly close.  It wasn't until we were freshmen in high school and wound up sitting next to each other in the same French class that we somehow clicked and virtually became inseparable.  We shared secrets and dreams and anything else that came to mind back in those high school years.  We watched each other fall in love, wish that the one we'd fallen for would love us more, and shared our kleenex as we sobbed when Ryan O'Neal uttered those immortal words in Love Story,  that "love means you never have to say you're sorry".  It didn't take long though to find out that Ryan O'Neal was no real psychologist and that Ali McGraw still died no matter how many times you watched the movie.

Henrietta and I moved on with our own separate lives in separate cities after graduation but somehow, and I give her all the credit, she kept the friendship from dissolving even when its depth had become no more than the width of a card and envelope.  Many years passed, who knows, maybe thirty, I quit counting, and Henrietta and her family moved back to Birmingham.  We both have moved on.  We rarely see each other except when I pop in occasionally where she works to say "hi" but when I do it's as if we've never been apart.  She sent me a birthday card a few days ago, with the same almost illegible handwriting that she had in high school, and scrawled on the back of the envelope was her home address.  It is the same address of the same house that she has lived in since she was a child, the house that she grew up in and the house that was so much a part of my own life.  I felt comforted by seeing that address.  There are so few constants in my world but that address is one of them because I know if I went there and rang the doorbell that she would answer.

So Happy Birthday in a few hours, Henrietta. I love you, my always and forever best friend.