Best Friends

Most of us, at some point in our childhood or teenage years, had a best friend. Mine best friend was Ruth. During our junior high school years, we were inseparable, especially during the summer. Ruth's parents both worked and her older siblings were seldom at home. We spent so much time together that the new neighbors thought we were sisters. Ruth's parents actually had to call my house and tell her to come home. Of course, I went along...

Ruth and I spent many after school hours playing Yahtzee at her parents' kitchen table. We baked chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies, and watched TV in her living room. We rode bikes, played jump rope and four-square, and Hide and Go Seek with the neighbors on dark summer nights. She went camping with us and I went to the Catskill mountains with her family. She called my parents "Mom" and "Dad", and I did the same with hers, but somewhere along the way we drifted apart.

A few years ago on Memorial Day an article appeared in the local newspaper. A story of two brothers who'd found each other far away in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War. The second brother in the story was my other "dad". Yesterday I found his death notice in the local newspaper. In a few weeks there will be a Memorial Service, and though I haven't seen my friend in several years, I will be there, after all, for a space in time we were family.