My Serendipity

Short of floating in a cloud of twinkling glitter and a fairly God mother standing beside me, it was the most ethereal scene I could have dreamed up. But it was real. She was real; the fishnet stockings, the short, jean miniskirt, the magnificent, long, naturally curly hair-all real. It is impossible to think about that day without the most profound feeling of kismet and gratitude.

Leaving school for the long walk home, I bumped into the girl who I had met at a party almost a year earlier but hadn’t since seen. Our eyes met, we regarded one another, and there we stood in our bare, naked souls.

“Hey” she said, “what are you doing?” “I just got out of detention” I replied. “Want to come over to my house and have a coke?” “Sure”. That was it, that was all it took for her and I to know we could trust one another.

Plagued with personality at an age when it was not acceptable, large breasts at an equally conspicuous greenness, and a loudness and appetite for fun fare when it was more fashionable to be a miserable, quiet fit-in. I found it amazing that anyone at all could take exception to her altogether lovely being. I wondered what was so offensive. I could almost hear the thoughts of our peers when I perceived them sneering at her “how dare she laugh so loud, sing in public or speak up in class and not be ashamed of herself” or, “How dare she have her talent and not be more shy about displaying it?” or, my personal favorite “how dare she have such big boobs!”

It was true that she could nothing if she didn’t do it with panache. Her walk was a marriage of swaying and marching. Her comments in class, correct or not, were confident and full of flowery language. Her pastimes, which I can personally avouch for, were hair-brained and off-the-hook, sheer scientific inquiry. Her ambitions lay in theatrics and singing. Of course it was far more permissible to back-bite, cheat, grovel, suck-up, gossip and lie if one did it fashionably, which sadly often meant quietly, than it was to be unique. So with all of her charms, one could add to them a kind of true-ness, integrity, which for all their efforts, our classmates could not touch or take away. I loathed them then, but I pity them now.

When I say we could not have been more different, resist the temptation to say back that opposites attract. We were neither the same nor were we antithetical. I was not the side-kick, she was not the “leader”, but together, we shared a self-sustaining friendship that made Jr. and High School bearable, and freed us of any kind of cliché existence or ordinary experience. For all of the crap that the lesser youth at our school dished out to her, she had the most remarkably forgiving and trusting heart. She truly saw the good in people more than I was able, and I considered that one of my strong points.

If you were to ask me about myself I could share nothing after the age of fourteen that isn’t indelibly touched by my friendship with Aubrey Anne Adams. Hikes, concerts, restaurants, beaches, parties, performances, college, boyfriends, babies-they all bear the watermark of one of the world’s finest people. I cannot suppress a smile even at the slightest thought of her. She is one of the reasons I came to believe in a loving and very personal kind of God.