Maintaining female friendships is like walking barefoot through a weedy lawn. You never know when you'll step on thistles so you have to pick your steps carefully with the full knowledge that one wrong move and you'll be screaming in pain. Women don't fathom why men don't understand us better. Can you blame them? We don't understand each other, so men don't have a hope in hell.Remember way back to grade school? Remember hanging out with groups of girls who you could never trust? Remember them turning on you in a flash? Remember that awful feeling of being totally alone as your former friends turned their backs on you? This is the reason why I, for the most part, picked male friends. They were pretty hard to offend, they were always fun, and they knew how to keep a secret.
One of my very best friends was a boy I met in third grade. His name was Derrol and as soon as our eyes met across the crowded classroom, we each knew we had found our partner in evil. There were no restrictive girl type rules on what we could or could not do. Nothing was off limits and our imagination ran wild with one new adventure after another. My memories of Derrol and all the ridiculous things we did together still make me laugh.
Our friendship carried on through the years and withstood years of separation when I moved to another province. Letters were exchanged and we would save our allowance to make periodic long distance calls. When I moved back at the age of 15, we picked up as if I had never left. It was during the summer between grade 11 and 12 that Derrol gave me a chance at something I had never had before: a friendship with a girl. He introduced his friend Cheryl to me before he left for a one year stint as an exchange student in Germany. I knew she was the one for me when she jumped on the idea for our first activity without Derrol: crashing a convention for lawyers. My theory was that it was a perfect place to meet men and she agreed. Our searching turned up nothing that day but I think we both realized that we had found something pretty special in each other.
Memories of our friendship have created a crazed mosaic that can only be interpreted by the two of us: school, our first apartment together, marriage, divorce, good and bad men, acts that bordered on the illegal, and death. Cheryl and I had stopped talking for a couple of years over something I'm sure neither of us can remember. It was during this time that Derrol gave us his final gift. We had all lost touch with Derrol for reasons that will remain private. One day Cheryl's mother saw his obituary in the newspaper. Cheryl called me to tell me and the pain I felt in that moment is something I'll never be able to describe. We slowly began to exchange phone calls and were able to find our way back to that friendship we used to share.
It has been years since Derrol passed away and Cheryl and I are back in the swing of things. Granted, we are bit too old for activities that border on the illegal and she tends to fall asleep on my couch when she visits (which puts a real crimp on anything that might take place after 9:00 pm). She is visiting this summer and I plan to put her down for an afternoon nap so I can take her for another late night skinny dip at my cabin. She told me that she had better stop eating carbs before the event. I informed her that with true friends one can carbo-load before skinny dipping and know that their secret is always safe. That's what good friends do.
