There's a home video that is likely preserved on a dvd at my parent's house, something my siblings and I did for our mom several years ago (I watched hours of shaky VHS footage of my baby brother wandering around in mud puddles so I could tell the tech genius which minutes of which tapes to convert), of two little girls sitting at our kitchen table. One is me, and I'm wearing some kind of puffy sweatshirt and a 1980's Red Sox cap, playing noisily with some stuffed animals.
The other is a curly-haired brunette with huge brown eyes, doing her best to get the attention of my mom, who is behind the camera. Her voice is rising because my mom is just filming us, not interracting. "Hey Amy. Amy. Hey Amy!"
"What, Elizabeth?"
"Guess what. PeeWee HermanandElvis (as if they are one person) is dead! He's dead, because he took too many drugs! And thats why he died."
This is Liz.
My best friend of more than 32 years has always been the one with all the hot, new information (even if it is sometimes not entirely accurate). She's the one who taught me that Play-Doh tastes like salt, that there are not always consequences for tiny, little white lies to your parents about your exact location and activities, and that her mom (a nurse, and thus the authority on everything a girl would want to know) had a condom drawer in the hallway of their house by middle school "just in case anyone needs them". Spoiler alert: I certainly did not need them. But we giggled over it a lot.
Since meeting in preschool, Elizabeth and I grew up together, her with a house full of sisters, Barbie fashions, and a gold vanity in her bedroom, and me with my love of baseball, dirt, and all things not marketed to little girls in the 1990s.
Liz got me my first job, working as a cashier in her grandmother's video store. Together, we navigated the hilarious, horrifying awkwardness of being teenagers who had to sometimes rent adult DVDs to grown men while we looked them in the eye and told them to have "a nice night". We visited each other at work just to hang out, drink bottles of Mountain Dew and laugh so hard that it was difficult to wait on customers. "Don't pull a 'video store'" is still part of the greater family vernacular. If you don't know what that means, you don't want to.
I was constantly after her in high school to follow the rules. While my mother likely hoped Liz's mom, Debbie, was able to give me the embarrassing answers I needed about sex education, I was the "you better behave" influence on Liz, chastising her for drinking on campus, or skipping a class, or doing any number of normal, teenage rebellion activities. Still, we only got into one fight, and it was about the timing of reservations for Harry Potter movie tickets (oh yeah, I should mention that despite all our differences, we were, and still are, both incurable fantasy nerds. It's nice to have someone you can collect useless Star Wars soda cans with).
In February of 2014, I was preparing to move back to New England after a particularly ill-advised move to central Florida that lasted all of 7 months. Liz volunteered to fly down and drive north with me. Originally, the idea was that she would come for a day or two and then we would leave on our road trip. As time got crunched and the plan evolved, it turned into me picking her up from a gate at the Jacksonville airport, truck packed to the ceiling, and getting immediately on I-95 heading north. Liz never complained about this, and she was in Florida for less than two hours, only to spend the next two days entirely in the car, staring at the interstate with me (well, not entirely. There was also the 45 minutes spent lost in Washington, DC when we needed gas and I also desperately needed donuts).
Today is Liz's 36th birthday (eleven days after mine), and it's also Patriot's Day/Marathon Day in Massachusetts. Eight years ago, on April 15th, two terrorists placed homemade bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon and killed three people, injured hundreds, and paralyzed the entire city and state with fear for several days during a manhunt. I was finishing work in upstate New York when I heard the news. The physical feeling I had was like someone had opened my mouth and poured ice cold water all the way directly to my stomach. I started calling friends and family in Boston, and the texts were coming in that everyone was safe, but I couldn't reach Liz. Boston has Patriot's Day Monday off, and I expected that she and her friends would be drinking beer at a bar near the finish line. I panicked, and her cell phone would either ring forever, or be a constant busy signal. I had to pull my car over, sobbing and screaming and hitting the steering wheel. I finally heard from her family that Liz was safe. She hadn't made it to that part of town by the time the bombs went off, although she was on her way. She came way too close to being right in the middle of it. My wild, carefree best friend now carries stress and anxiety struggles from that day, as I'm sure so many still do.
When I drove from Colorado to Maine to see friends and family last fall during the pandemic, I stopped in Salem, MA, where Liz and her husband, Branden, and their daughter now live. I had only met Emlyn once before, as an infant, but we are now obviously bonded. She talks about me often, after only a short visit, and for Christmas I mailed her a framed photo of me holding her as a baby, because Liz said a picture of me was "probably the only thing she wanted". I think it's hilarious, and I attribute this affection in part to the fact that the poor kid had been in quarantine for 6 months when I stopped by. I said this to another friend, who countered "well, she's Liz's kid, of course she loves you".
This blog post could be 100 pages. I could write an entire book of moments and stories about our 30+ year friendship. Liz just makes everything more fun. Whether it's concocting what we thought would be Harry Potter's "butter beer" (it was hot milk with butterscotch syrup, sugar, honey, and cinnamon... it was inedible), walking through half the city of Boston at 3 am (because I visited her in college and she dragged me to a house party, where we didn't leave until the trains stopped running), or trying on hats at the inexplicably huge costume store at South of the Border on I-95, she has always been the friend who will drop everything to make sure you're having a good time.
Happy Birthday, Liz. My life would not be the adventure it's been had I not met you over a Play-Doh tasting all those years ago.
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