Friends in high places...

Just about a month ago, my friend Audrey in Pennsylvania passed away.... I believe she was 93. Audrey was the supervisor of the clerks when I started working at the library in NY so many years ago. She was the mother hen to the clerks (as one of the clerks was fond of saying) and she was very good at discovering what everyone's strong points were. And if you didn't have a strong point, she would see to it that you learned one right quick.

Audrey had told me over the phone one day "I don't understand why God isn't taking me. I'm tired of not feeling well! I'm tired of not being able to do everything I want to do! I wish He would realize that I'm ready to go!" I had no answer for that, but she wasn't looking for one. I think she just wanted to get her opinion out into the universe, loud and clear.

And God (or The Powers That Be, or whatever you believe in) heard Audrey one day and let her go. Now she knows all the secrets that everyone on the planet wonders about.

My friend Frankie also knows all the secrets..... she passed away about six years ago, and we miss her still. She was "a character," as my young friend Miss C used to say. And indeed Frankie was-- a character. She could disarm you with her politically incorrect but right-on-target sense of humor hiding behind that short bob of gray hair and her "granny glasses" (as she herself called them).

My friend Alice..... who watched her diet, who quit smoking when the Surgeon General said to, who exercised regularly, who was careful not to catch germs from "coughing and sneezing sick people who should have stayed under the covers"-- she passed away a few years after we moved to Texas.

My friend Blanche, who passed away before we got married years ago..... who knew as soon as she set eyes on my husband that he was the one who would get me to marry him. As circumstance would have it, Blanche not only knew my husband's family (and had worked with his mother) but she knew most of their friends as well. "That boy comes from a fine family, L, so you won't go wrong with that one...... plus, his mother is a doll, a living doll." Blanche was right.

My friend Lou...... in whose Coffee Shoppe I had lunch every day when I worked at the library... and sometimes I had dinner there as well. And even if I wasn't hungry for dinner, I'd go in there after work anyway and have some tea and talk to Lou and his son, and to Blanche if she was still working that late. When Lou met my husband (we had gone there for lunch on our first date), Lou told me "Marry him! Marry him already! Marry him and I'll make you a wedding dinner you'll never forget." So I did. And Lou did. And our wedding dinner in Lou's Coffee Shoppe was indeed memorable.

My friend Jerry, who passed away too quickly and too suddenly, leaving his wife missing her "Prince." And he was a Prince.... such a nice, solid man who was a gentleman of the old school, who could make you laugh with his unexpectedly dry sense of humor, and who could see things so clearly at times that he left you wondering how you could have missed the obvious.

Other friends..... like "The Chief" and his wife Catherine, and Mr. T, and Gene.... library people who kept in touch with me for years after I left NY for Texas... they are all gone now. And things come up now and then which remind me of their friendly ways.... and I shake my head in complete wonder that so many years have gone by since I stood in the library at the checkout counter and either basked in the quiet or cringed at the Story Hour commotion.

I usually think of all these friends on New Year's Eve, when the midnight music makes me remember Guy Lombardo and his orchestra, and wish they were still around to bring in the New Year. I miss Guy Lombardo too...... my grandmother loved him because he looked "bella... bella..." in his tuxedo.

"Friends in high places." That's where I like to think they are... way up there in the clouds somewhere, looking down and tsk-tsking at all of us as we worry and fret over such insignificant trivial bumps along the road.

It's a foggy morning... ghostly, ethereal... we can't even see the end of the pastures.

I miss my dad. I miss my dad. I miss my dad. I'm beginning to forget the sound of his voice. I have to concentrate really hard to remember the cadence of his voice, the pronunciations, the exact sounds. I miss my dad. I miss my dad. I miss my dad. I miss my dad.