Time Shares and Time Shared

I finally had the chance -- or maybe it was the nerve -- to sit down and flip through the overstuffed blue binder my friend's daughter had given me on Saturday morning, minutes before she left for her first day at college.

The binder itself reminded me of my friend: haphazard, scattered, and filled with warmth and humor and dreams and honesty and hints of thoughts kept to itself so as not to make anyone else uncomfortable. I have a similar binder somewhere, the one we were given on our first day at a writing class together in Milwaukee, a three-hour weekly class bookended by two hour and a half car rides. During the class, I had to share my friend with others; I liked the rides to and from the best, when I had her all to myself.

Barb was an immediate hit with the folks from Milwaukee, who, as creative as they all were, were somewhat unaccustomed to her special brand of brilliance -- a unique blend of self deprecating humor, insightful amusement, introspection, and more than a touch of lunacy. Within three minutes, she was everyone's pet. I was both proud to have brought her into the fold and, I admit, a bit jealous to have suddenly become simply the person responsible for bringing everyone such a magical gift.

As competent and gifted as she was, even the smallest things in life could be tough for Barb to navigate. Having struggled for years with multiple sclerosis, she was, at the time of our writing class, also struggling with breast cancer and all the special things that entailed -- overinflated and itchy implants, side effects from various medications, and, most unsettling, the constant fear of metastasis. Fears aside, she was always hopeful; she had no idea, at the time, how limited her days would be.

I flipped through the binder this morning, and found a piece she had written to share with the class. It was about a Hawaiian vacation she and her husband had taken recently to celebrate her fiftieth birthday. The descriptions were hilarious, and, to someone who knew her and her husband quite well, frightening credible. Somewhere on page two, after she alluded to the annual personal documentary of her life that "flickers on the screen of [her] closed eyelids" each year around the time of her birthday, she put on the brakes.

On the threshold of revealing some of the "indescribable joys and unthinkable sadness" of the decade that had just passed, she panicked, unable to put them in writing. Instead, she inserted a brief explanation of what she had hoped to be able to write, but could not:

(THIS HERE IS THE PART WHERE I WRITE REAL GOOD STUFF ABOUT AGING, ILLNESS & ATTEMPTS AT PERSONAL GROWTH AND SEGUE SEAMLESSLY TO THE REST OF THE STORY.)

And, as promised, she segued seamlessly to the rest of the Hawaii story, focusing on her brave and stumbling foray into the unknown world of snorkels and the ocean floor. A fearsome trip into a mysterious new place. Hmm.

I wish she could have seen her daughter on Saturday, looking all grown up and yet like a small child, at once nervous and excited as she packed up her last items and headed to a mysterious new place. She would have been so proud.