Never Walked In High Heels

I hadn’t seen my best friend from childhood in just over eleven years when I saw her walk down the aisle. Three weeks earlier I had slung my duffle bag down from college as my mother announced that we would be attending the wedding. This was news to me. The fact that Mary was getting married before she could legally drink was news to me.  If I thought about it long enough, the fact that Mary even still existed would’ve been news as well.

Mary and I grew up together going to zoos and Six Flags Great America. I remember dance was her life and school was mine. We were awkward in the ways that only eight year old girls can be, complete with knobby knees and a palate that could only appreciate the subtleties of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.  When Mary got her ears pierced it meant I could too. We went through puberty together, started to become curious about boys, and planned our hypothetical weddings during ten thousand sleepovers.

The Sunday before school started one August, Mary’s mother told us that the family would be moving away. I saw Mary for the last time three months later.

And so I finished junior high, went through high school and half of college rarely thinking of my childhood friend. Thus, going to Kansas to see a wedding of a friend from half a lifetime ago was less than appealing.

I settled myself into the pew, not knowing why I and my family were even at the wedding in the first place. I literally had no idea who the bride and groom were. When the church doors would open, I didn’t even know what she was going to look like. It was the wedding of absolute strangers.

The beautiful bride was halfway down aisle before I realized my cheeks were wet. Where were these tears coming from? I didn’t know her. I certainly didn’t know him. Yet the tears weren’t forced. It wasn’t that I was at a wedding  so I was supposed to be crying becuase that’s what you are supposed to do when the bride walks. The tears were real. All I could think of was us rehearsing our weddings at ten, and how the things we dreamt about in our Barbie sleeping bags were just beginning to happen.

There is something about the dreams and connections of our childhoods which stay with us. Long before we make the comprises and unexpected commitments we dare to aspire to, even to the point of having a sense of innocent entitlement.  And while often these golden rings slip away from us, sometimes they come back in the most unexpected ways. Mary never was a professional dancer. She went into Math. Somehow I ended up being the performer.

But for once, as I was watching Mary and her husband dance the last dance of the evening, everything seemed familiar.