My
best friend Ronnie and I never see each other
these days, but she is one of the
greatest people there is and not a day goes by I don't think of her, out there, on the
Great Plains, far from here.
We really aren't very
alike, she and I. She's at least ten years older than I, though she won't admit it. She has two kids, a long-ago brief marriage, a girlfriend. I have a dog. She rides a motorbike. I ride a bicycle. The
internet ( its greatest achievement, in my mind ) has kept us together.
She sends me
email nearly every day, though I am a
schmuck and
maybe write her back. She would like to hear from me
more, though I know she doesn't expect it.
Every time Ronnie buys a
lottery ticket, she emails me immediately, telling me exactly what fun we're going to have with all that money. There's no question of not winning. Though there are some days I get an email saying, "I guess we aren't going to
Bermuda this week, honey."
We do have plans to live together in
Alaska once we are elderly. I'll have a
rowboat, go
fishing, and
chop wood. She thinks she'll
knit and
read ( which she does now, but I don't argue ).
Ronnie loves
Mondays. I know, I know. Mondays are
hell. But I've gotten in the
habit on the worst of Monday mornings, I just call her up at work. It's like pure
adrenaline, the best. I mean, her
energy and
joy just sizzle across all those miles of
copper wire.
She wrote me this, just the other day:
"another funny thing, well it was funny to me and even at the time, although you might not find any humour in it at all..."
"last week i went to grab a bowl out of the draintray, and it had like dried crusty foodstuffs on it, and i am thinking to myself, bleah!... so i reach for another dish, same thing, dish after dish after dish...by now i'm a little concerned and even freaked... so i look in the cupboard and most of the dishes are fine. so i pile the dishes in the sink and run hot water over them and while the sink is filling i go find Justice and ask her about it ( since she has that duty of
keeping the kitchen clean )."
"she tells me: well... three days ago you threw away my little green scrubber, and i dont have one now... so i say: what the hell does a little green scrubber have to do with keeping the dishes clean? ... and so she says to me: mom, use your head, i use it to get off the crusty stuff! ... so i think a minute, and i'm really having a hard time making sense of it, and so i ask her: why didnt you just soak the dishes a bit and then use a washcloth? ... and so she says to me: i dont have that kind of time mom, but i used really hot water and that anti-bacterial dishsoap you bought and i'm sure i sterilized the hell out of those dishes, and so that is really clean crud and you can eat off of them dishes just like normal."
"now then, i thought that was funny at the time, i laughed til i cried, and i gave her money to drive up to the store to buy a little green scrubber and had her do all the dishes in the house as a punishment, and all the flatware, and all the glasses, even though she protested and squeaked her hands across the glass and insisted it was clean because it squeaked and that i should put more trust in anti-bacterial dishsoap and hot-water sterilization..."
Now tell me this, though we really are so
far away now, Ronnie and I, how could I not love her
best?