In high school I had a great friend. She dragged me around with her wherever she went. She had her own car, and often that little Chevette would come careening on to my driveway with a cloud of dust, and off we’d go to Steinbach, the ‘city’, or just to town for some snack food. She taught me how to change clothes while driving a manual on our way to the city, she taught me (during her brief stint at DQ) that the chicken burger really was the best in town, and she taught me that she cared. She hosted the best birthday party I ever had – an all purple sweet 16, complete with a wicked game of spoons. She helped to pass the time on our bus ride to school, by concocting the funniest, most wicked stories about the same truck that was parked on the roadside for 2 weeks straight. And she was my hero when she decided to get baptized at the same time as me, and confronted our baptism teacher with the fact that she was pretty sure it was possible for dinosaurs to have existed and that this did not represent a conflict with her belief in God.

I haven’t seen this friend in at least 9 years…until yesterday, at her mother’s funeral. Our reunion was bittersweet (why is it that it takes a funeral for you to reconnect with an old friend?). But I was reminded that there was/is value in this friendship. I was reminded that someone knew me, and appreciated me when I was 16 and still does, something I don’t always remember in my intense moments of insecurity.