Saving Graces by Elizabeth Edwards

Author:Elizabeth Edwards
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780767926355
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2006-09-26T10:00:00+00:00

Back in Raleigh, as Cate’s senior year started, she was beginning to grow anxious about losing her friends when everyone moved on to college. I had convinced her to apply for early decision somewhere, and she had narrowed the choice to between Princeton and Duke—in my view, the school she really wanted and the school where she would be closer to her friends. She finally applied to Princeton, and then she complained to me for months that I had made her apply there, away from her friends. It was endless, and as the end of school approached, it was constant. When, just before graduation, Cate’s eighth-grade English teacher returned letters to the students that they had written to themselves four years before concerning their ambitions for high school, I was vindicated. Cate had written that she wanted to finish calculus by her sophomore year, which she did, that she wanted to play varsity softball all four years, which she did, and that she wanted to go to Princeton. Princeton! Right there in her eighth-grade handwriting, before I had mentioned colleges to her! Rarely does a mother get a break like that.

But I understood what was behind Cate’s complaints. She had only known one place, one group of friends, and although she was not afraid to face a new place—she had gone to lots of camps and the TIP program at Duke, places where she knew no one—she was afraid to lose the place, and the friends she knew best. I told her she wouldn’t lose them, she’d add to them, that it’s like when you have a child and think you couldn’t love any more than you do, and then you have a second child, and it turns out you can love twice as much. No sale. It is like Jesus and the fishes and loaves, I tried again—there is always enough for the people you know and for the people farther up the beach whom you haven’t come to yet. Again, no sale. Time, of course, has proved to her what her mother could not convince her of: that her lifetime friends would always be her lifetime friends. They have part of you, part of your life, in them, so you don’t want to lose them. But you don’t lose them because you also have part of them in you. It changes. But it doesn’t evaporate. I knew this to be true, even for relationships that hadn’t incubated over eighteen years, for my life was scattered across an entire country of people with whom I had shared it and about whom I still cared. When I moved to Washington, I went to the Jacob Lawrence exhibit at the Phillips Collection with Martha Hartmann, and it was like the thirty-four years (thirty-four years!) since we had been friends in Atsugi, Japan, had slid silently away. I had lunch with Maggie Ketchum this winter, thirty-two years after we were in graduate school together; I still love her.

I was trying to coax

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