She’s 50 years old today. Well, not yet, not exactly. She pointed this out to me in her exacting sort of way when we stood together briefly in her driveway this morning. She was not fifty at 10:15 this morning. No. She won’t be fifty exactly until 9:45 tonight.
Then she’ll be fifty. Right now, she’s still in her late forties.
Not that she minds. Not that she’s putting it off. Emily isn’t one of those who sweats the small stuff– stuff like growing older. She loves birthdays. She loves her birthday. She likes to celebrate early and often. And she should.
I didn’t really discover her until (almost) her 45th birthday. Bill and I were invited to the party. It came as a surprise– the invitation did. Until that point, our conversations were limited to brief and delightful ones in the hallways of our church building, conversations about books (usually) that invariably included an invitation to join her bookclub (the one that was, at the time, composed of only Emily and Rachel, the one that I since joined and enjoyed, the one that, sadly, I had to give up when I went back to work two years ago), conversations that found all of us laughing, conversations that left me thinking, “I really like that Emily-person.” And that was all.
But by her 46th birthday, she was a Friend, Real and True. Who knows how it happened, exactly? Who knows how these things happen? Despite her exactingness, I’m not even sure that Emily herself knows. There’s a thought.
What I do know is that it did happen, and that all sorts of things were involved. Things like the music of Aaron Copland and the first Lord of the Rings movie, things like the church orchestra and jotto and children’s Christmas programs and Vacation Bible School and scones and Risk and Hot Donuts Now. There was an abundance of talking in there, and some real listening, too (I’ll let you guess who did most of what), and some honest and true insecurity from me because Emily is so very exacting, and this, at times, can be scary.
Books, as I said, were also involved. Books, when it comes to me, are almost always involved. Happily, they are also involved with Emily. She usually knows what she thinks of books. She reads them carefully; she gives the author the benefit of the doubt; she gives the writer exactly a third of the text before she might (only rarely) give up on it. And when you ask her, she pretty much knows exactly what page she’s on, or what percentage of it she’s read, and how many more hours (basically exactly) it’s going to take her to finish. I gave her a book for her 45th birthday. She didn’t exactly love it, but she read it all.
And blogging was involved. She’s one of my top readers, don’t you know, and a Tremendous Encouragement (you have no idea). And my book was involved, too. Which she’s read. Well, not exactly all of it. But she has read exactly as much as I would allow her, and she’s told me exactly what she thinks of it. She thinks a lot of it, and this is her One Failing, because it is not good yet. Not At All. So she is wrong about this.
But this exception proves the rule. In Every Other Way, Emily’s opinion can be trusted. And this, because she is exacting. She thinks about things, you see. She is thoughtful. She is generous. She is True.
When someone like this likes you– I mean, really, really Likes You– it means a lot. Believe You Me.
So I guess you could say that we’ve been friends for five years, but that would not be exactly right. More like four. But that’s not right, either. It’s somewhere in-between, I guess. I do know that it hasn’t been nearly long enough. Not Nearly.
“If anyone should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I feel it could no otherwise be expressed than by making answer, ‘Because it was he; because it was I.’ There is, beyond all my reasoning powers and beyond anything I can say about it in particular, I know not what inexplicable and inevitable power that brought on this union.” -Montaigne: On Friendship
“I like not only to be loved, but to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same kind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of literature and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.” -George Eliot
Happy, Happy Birthday, Dear You.
