Last Friday I had the honor of attending the wedding of my oldest childhood friend. It was probably the most emotional wedding I’ve ever been to—even I cried a little. And it was gorgeous, but not too serious (so pretty much the opposite of my solemn pajama wedding).
There was much eating, much drinking, and much dancing. When it was time to do toasts and stories, I had a really hard time picking one, because when you’ve known someone for as long as you can remember, when you were like their awkward extra cousin growing up, you collect a hoard of things you love about them. I ended up going with a serious, mushy story about some advice she gave me during a dark time in my life: “When God is all you have, you realize that God is all you need.” The moral of this story? If Peter ever needs advice, Sarah is always right—because after something that serious, the room needed some comic relief.
Sarah’s grandparents lived across the street from my parents, so whenever she would go over to her grandparents’ house and it wasn’t a holiday where I was obligated to be somewhere else, we would either play at her grandparents’ house or at mine. Since I’ve known her kind of forever, I’m going to have to be selective about which memories to include here, because I could literally write a book, and because you don’t need to know all the gristly details about things like awkward female conversations, who had a crush on who, the time I had the wrong phone number, color-coded easter egg hunts, prank calling Miranda, or the time Sarah helped me dig a hole in the giant bush fort to dispose of something (that was NOT a dead body).
I don’t remember meeting Sarah. She tells me that she remembers my mom being pregnant with Gideon, and I guess that’s possible (I remember going to the hospital to visit her/him after he was born—which I totally shouldn’t because I was only 2 1/2). I’m pretty sure that the story that we tell is something that our childhood minds contrived. Basically the tale goes that I was playing on one of the swings that hung from a giant fir tree in my front yard and she saw me and came over and we started playing. That’s about all we’ve got. If anyone (*cough*cough*parents*) who might have actually been there and old enough to remember introducing us to each other would like to share the real story, I would appreciate that.
By the time we were four years old, I would spend the night at her grandma’s house (never at my house) with her when she stayed there. Here’s a picture from what I think was our first sleep over. Gideon was a turd and ripped it up when we were pretty young, but my mom pieced it back together and pasted it on a piece of cardstock for me.
- Friday, July 29, 2016
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