andâexcept on days when I was PMS-ing and was therefore lessâmore. Okay, except for maybe the very last sentence, but I was hoping that, in the fullness of time, that might prove true, too.
Just like Cathy once proclaimed, âI am Heathcliff, and he is me,â I am a green M&M. Further, as far as Iâm concerned, the fact that Iâm a green M&M has pretty much well explained for me the reason why getting dates has never been a problem.
Pam, on the other hand, has always viewed the matter quite differently.
9
O kay. Okay okay OKAY! I know youâre not going to let me go any further without first explaining how Pam came to be my best friend and just what exactly a âdefault best friendâ is.
Straight out of college, my best friendâmy real best friendâknown as Best Girlfriend, the woman who thinks men find me scary, embarked on a series of geographical moves purposely designed to keep her out of Connecticut. The distance has only grown farther as the years have gone on. Having started out in New York, six moves later has seen her temporarily settled on the Oregon coast. Itâs my private belief, one of the few beliefs I have never shared with her for fear of giving her an idea that she hasnât had yet, that sheâs just one last move away from Alaska. After that, Iâm sure Iâll lose her to Russiaâsheâll probably walk across to it one day when the ocean is frozen really goodâand then the world.
I know weâre supposed to be a mobile society, but mobility is just not something that people in my family do. And itâs not that I mind Best Girlfriendâs independence, her freedom, her sense of adventure. On the contrary, itâs one of the many things I admire about her. I just wish the distance between us didnât make it so hard for us to sit on Irwin Lernerâs face together.
Perhaps I need to explain that last remark.
While we were at UCONN togetherâme in Liberal Arts, she in Fine Artsâwe fell into a set of fairly regular habits, the kind of habits that helped normalize a life lived during an uncertain time when the drinking age was just beginning its incremental progress from eighteen to twenty-one (hence, we were all doing the constant-slow-IV-drip kind of drinking as opposed to the binge drinking that occurs in the much safer college atmospheres we have now) and AIDS was just thinking of poking its head over the American horizon (meaning that most of us were getting laid, fairly regularly, sometimes by people we barely knew, and none of us were using rubbers). Some of our life-raft habits included practical things, like always letting the other know approximately where weâd be when we went out (âA party, I think over in South Campusâ) and approximately when weâd return (âTomorrow morning? Tomorrow afternoon? Definitely sometime in thereâ). All right, so maybe we never were so exact with the information that any efficient sort of police report could ever be filed, should such a thing prove necessary, but it was just barely enough to technically pass the telling-the-truth test whenever I told my mother, âNot to worry: Best Girlfriend is keeping tabs on me.â Did it really matter how close those tabs on me were?
Other life-raft habits included: eating breakfast together(8:15 to 9:45 a.m.), but only if we were still up from the night before, because otherwise weâd never be up by then; lunch together (10:15 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.); and dinner together (4:15 to 6:45 p.m.); oh, and milk shakes at the snack bar set up in the cafeteria after dinner (8:00 p.m. to whenever). So maybe we didnât make it to a lot of our classes, and maybe that does sound like a lot of time devoted to eating (which might also finally explain the notorious weight problem known as the Freshman 15), but I swear to God we did not spend all of that time eating. It was just that we always seemed to have a lot
Robert & Lustbader Ludlum