The Best Friend in the World by Howard Books

Author:Howard Books
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Howard Books
Published: 2007-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

BYBEV SCHELLENBERG

It started with a pair of slippers.

It was the first day of kindergarten. Excited, nervous, desperate for someone to be with once Mommy left me, I took the fuzzy blue slippers out of my bag. “May I put these next to yours?” I asked the tiny girl who stood beside me in the cloakroom, her hair as black as mine was blond. It was okay to talk to this stranger, I thought. Her mom and mine were in line, waiting to talk to the teacher, and they were talking.

“Yes, you can put your slippers here,” she said, as she moved over her brown corduroy slippers along the ledge above the coatracks. Our slippers were inseparable after that, as were we. We fended off the class clown with our lunch buckets, narrowly missed being pounded by a class bully down at the tracks, ran together on the track team, played on opposite soccer teams at recess but had a secret pact to help each other, joked about her diminutive height, and performed as Snow White and the head dwarf in the school play. It was a united childhood, despite her strong Sikh upbringing and my just as strict Christian family background. She focused on sports while I found joy in practicing piano for three hours a day.

The day I told her I was adopted, she told her mom, “I want to be adopted, too.” Twenty years later (after she’d grown taller than me), I met my birth mom, and she ran the poor woman through a battery of questions that would have made the FBI proud, all because my friend wanted to make sure this stranger wouldn’t hurt me.

Little girls talking about the children they’d have, turned into teenagers worrying about the offspring they’d bring into the world. ‘What if I have a boy whose head is always stuck in a book, or a girl who only likes playing piano and singing?” she groaned.

“Well, what if I have a boy who only likes sports and a girl who hates reading?” I responded.

“We’ll have to switch kids,” we agreed.

We turned into professional women: her, a speech therapist; me, a music teacher and writer. Married with children, the connection remains. Rather than switch children, we exchange advice. At eight years old, her daughter is a natural musician, her head in the glorious clouds of imagination and idealism, while my daughter, same age, seems to always have her nose in a book. Her seven-year-old son is a natural basketball player, while my six-year-old son prefers golf and has a speech delay. Our individual training proved beneficial—by the time my beautiful son was two-and-a-half, she dared to tell me he had to have weekly speech therapy or end up severely speech disabled, and I dared to fill her in on her daughter’s need for weekly music lessons and daily practice or she would end up miserable.

I still don’t know a phoneme from phonics, and she doesn’t know an eighth note from a middle C. But my son speaks fluently, and her daughter dances over the piano keys.

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