Back in October of 2014 Melanie Shankle, mine and Cassie’s most favorite blogger/author, announced she was taking photo submissions for the to-be video promoting her upcoming book. Well, yes…I think so! We scoured our photos and we ended up picking the same two pictures to submit: one from Easter 80s style when we were 4-years-old, and one from last football season at our local high school game in which her 6-year-old’s head had to be cropped out just below our chins because…offspring.
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| Easter 1988 |
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| Jacksonville Indian Football 2014 |
This was my email for submission:
"It started when Cassie was born in April of 1984. I waited almost 2 months on the planet without her...52 days. Our parents were friends then. Our friendship has outlasted that of our parent's. We have been through everything from the devastation of being put in separate 3rd grade classes to the loss of her mom this past summer. We celebrated 30 years of friendship this year which unfortunately means we are 30. I'm convinced she was given to me to compensate for my terrible memory (she was there for everything I forgot) and I'm certain she has some great purpose for me too."
What makes this so awesome is that Cassie and I have been friends since long before we can remember. If you read Melanie’s blog or books you’ll know Gulley. Melanie and Gulley have many of the friendship characteristics Cassie and I share. We often speak of them as though we are all in a fun circle of friends, but in fact they don’t even know we exist…yet. Which explains why our husbands think 30 has catapulted us into cerebral distress. I can’t tell you how many times we say, “Melanie and Gulley”, to which they reply, “WHO?” Surely they’ll catch on sooner or later.
So you can imagine my elation when I was awakened by a text message early one Wednesday morning from Cassie, “Check this out.” With a link to Melanie’s blog post that morning. (Sidenote: Cassie and I cherish our sleep deeply, so I knew whatever this link revealed would be pertinent information to elicit the possibility of waking me up… before sunrise.) Sure enough, the link led to the blog post on Big Mama where Melanie had revealed the promo video! These were my thoughts…groggy ones… OH MY GOSH OH MY GOSH! HAS CASSIE WATCHED THIS? OF COURSE SHE HAS. WHAT IF WE AREN’T IN IT? SHE WOULDN’T SEND IT SO EARLY IF WE WEREN’T IN IT! THERE MUST HAVE BEEN HUNDREDS OF PHOTOS SUBMITTED. NO WAY WE ARE ONE OF THEM. DID THEY USE THE TODDLER PICTURES OR THE PICTURES FROM THIS YEAR? OH MY GOSH OH MY GOSH!
And then I pressed play. I immediately noticed our picture in the blurred out picture collage as background for the opening text.
There we are!!! I had become completely alert by this point. As I lay there in my cozy bed with my screen locked vertical so I could watch it while I was horizontal, I listened to Melanie’s words about friendship. Words so accurate I feel like she plagiarized my heart maybe.
“…Those loyal soldiers who will defend us and stand with us when times get hard…But I guess that part of deep lasting friendship is that it develops with time, almost when you’re not paying attention…God chooses to knit our hearts together with a person often when we’re not even looking, and a day comes when we realize our heart is broken and we realize they are the first person we want to call…Do you have those people that will show up on your doorstep with food and Kleenex when the hard times come? Is there someone in your life that can look into your eyes and ask if you’re ok when they already know you’re not? Because those people are the ones that make life worth living. They are the ones that will hold our hands as we confess that our heart is breaking, our marriage is struggling, and the oldest kid is failing math. They cry with us as we lose a parent, hear a bad diagnosis or have a day when we can’t get out of bed. They cheer us on when we finish our last round of chemo, walk down the aisle to the man we prayed for, watch our baby graduate from high school, and finally fit back into our skinny jeans. They are the one who make “friend” make it seem like it’s not a strong enough word to describe what is really “the beat of our heart”. Because depending on the day you are each other’s mother, sister, friend, nurse, decorator, cheerleader, stylist or therapist. There are probably only a handful of times in our life when someone walks in who will change us forever. When we find someone we can love with our whole heart, who will challenge us and shape us and make us feel like the world is safer and brighter just because they are in it. A person who loves you for exactly who you are, yet teaches you to be better because of who they are and how they live their life. But having your soul knit to another isn’t for the faint of heart. It means you bear your own hurts along with those of your friend. You cry when they cry, and you laugh when they laugh…You love harder. You laugh louder. You live richer and you become more together than you could ever be by yourself...And to borrow a quote from Steven Schwartz, ‘We will know that whatever way our stories end, they will have rewritten ours by being our friend.’”
-Melanie Shankle
You can check out the
video here, and I strongly encourage it. Also, my brother kindly pointed out that our picture is at minute 2:55 for those who don't want to watch it in its entirety.
I don’t cry. Cassie knows it. Most people know that about me. That Wednesday morning I cried some fat happy tears. I suppose if you take meaningful words and pair it with music anything can happen. I cried fat happy tears as I remembered our bond that doesn’t materialize overnight. I cried because it didn’t happen by chance. Our friendship was God’s special gift to us and we cherish it intensely. I cried because within the last year my heart has been broken for no other reason than hers has been. I cried because there isn’t enough time in this life to start again and find what we have in each other. I cried because life wouldn’t be as funny and entertaining and amusing and awesome and whole without her in it.
Long story short: Cassie and I have a friendship that’s been built on a lifetime of questionable choices, ugly outfits, sleepovers, fender benders (both literal and figurative), glasses, braces, scrunchies, homework, cheer practice, finding our husbands, birthing humans and trying to teach them how to use the microwave and fix their own bowl of cereal ASAP, and finding our way back to where God intended for us to be. For the two of us to share these moments of elation and sheer giddiness throughout this year are just what we needed in the year following the pain and pure sorrow of a daughter losing her most precious mother. It doesn’t minimize the agony of loss, but it makes you wonder if cancer-free Brenda has a hand in all this greatness we’ve experienced lately…feels certain to me…FROM THIS SIDE OF THIRTY.
Labels: Friendship, Life
