Friends for life

It took a rather large pour of Chateau Grand Traverse Late Harvest Riesling, but we finally decided the last time we saw each other in person was 25 years ago. My friend Jean was living in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Joe, and their 6-month-old son, Patrick. I was living in Delaware, between newspaper jobs, barely earning minimum wage at a small medical office. It was August 1994. The debut of ”Friends” changed TV’s landscape forever. America Online offered a gateway to something called the World Wide Web. A first-class stamp was 29 cents. Regular gas was $1.11 per gallon. Now St. Louis residents, Jean and Joe visited last week on their drive home after a somewhat wacky road trip from Missouri to western Michigan over to the Canadian Falls bordering Ontario and New York state. Rebecca and I took these Cardinals fans to Comerica Park to see the Detroit Tigers play Kansas City. We actually won. After a hearty breakfast at our house, their final leg took them to The Henry Ford complex in Dearborn, Motown’s Hitsville USA museum, dinner at Chartreuse in Midtown and then to a downtown B&B for the night. The circuitous nature of their vacation reminded me of our friendship. It has been a long and winding road. Yet nearly 60 years of living has meant little regarding our ability to remain friends. Through phone calls, birthday cards, annual Christmas letters and yes, even social media, we’ve remained close and involved in each other’s lives. Jean and Joe added a second son, Brian, to their family in 1997. Sure, there were times when it would have been easier not to stay in touch. Like any relationship, ours has ebbed and flowed, with new jobs, multiple moves and unexpected stuff that eventually becomes your life. Growing apart doesn’t change the fact that as 20-something women, we grew up side by side. Jean and I met in summer 1983 after we were both recruited by Knight-Ridder Newspapers to work at a new joint venture in Miami called Viewtron. It was the first U.S. consumer videotext service, where you could shop, bank and receive local news right in your living room through your TV set with a paid subscription and lots of patience. This was before high-speed internet. Who needed Viewtron? Apparently, not many consumers. In March 1986, Viewtron folded, and the companies lost millions of dollars. We lost our jobs and suddenly had more beach time, at least for a few months. A journalism graduate fresh out of college, I had worked in the newsroom. Jean was in features because she was older and had more experience, including a master’s degree. Another reason she escaped before its demise. Jean was my first friend in South Florida, land of godforsaken summer heat and humidity, bugs you could saddle up and ride, and directionally challenged snowbirds. I hated it. Truly. To this day, I cannot believe I lasted five years there. We lived in the same North Miami apartment complex, which I think Jean actually found for me, a perfect stranger. It had a pool, tennis courts and palmetto bugs that flew like bats. Still, we could afford to live on our paltry salaries, eat an occasional balanced meal, and most importantly, drink beer. As I recall, most of my days were spent poolside since I worked afternoons, starting my shift anywhere from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., soaking up every ray of sunshine possible. I was 23, had never been away from home and was finally on my own. First job, first apartment, first everything. It was a crazy, wonderful, awful time. Lucky for me, this quiet kid from Detroit’s east side met a kind Fargo, N.D., farm girl, who saw a silver lining in nearly everything. She made the best of being a million miles from anything familiar. It was contagious. Most of us couldn’t afford to fly home for holidays, so we made our own second family in South Florida, amid the swamp critters and transients. Whenever I was homesick, I’d look up at the sky because I knew it was the same one my family and friends saw back home. Good friends are like the stars. You can’t always see them, but you know they’re there.