Being Accountable To the "Family We Choose"

I think we’ve all heard the saying “friends are family we choose.”  Well, one of the most important people in my chosen “family” is my friend Heather.

Heather and I met almost 30 years ago at McGill University when I was a freshman and she was a sophomore. We lived on the same floor of our dorm, and our first impression of each other was, well, awful.  She heard me screaming on the phone with Bell Canada when they messed up my phone installation and thought I was a bully.  I found out she invited everyone on our floor except me to a horseback riding weekend and I thought she was a “female dog”.  We kept our distance for a few weeks, until one day when Heather came right up to me, said she thought the two of us got off on the wrong foot and asked if we could start over.  We’ve been the best of friends ever since (and I found out that she really did miss inviting me to the horseback riding weekend by pure accident.  Unfortunately, my conversation with Bell Canada wasn’t misinterpreted – I really was being a bitch).

Heather’s and my friendship is living proof that opposites attract. She is a country mouse, I’m a born and bred New Yorker (one time we figured out that the population of her entire town fit on my block in Manhattan).  I have a mouth like a truck driver; the worst I’ve ever heard Heather say is “oh my gosh”.  Heather is a literary wizard and knows every important author, book plot and theme; I’m a math whiz.  But, Heather and I have also proven that opposites can also compliment each other quite well. People at McGill were always nice to me when Heather was around because they figured that someone as nice as her had to see something in me worth being friends with, and people were nice to Heather when I was around for fear that I’d kick their ass if they weren’t.

There are a million things that I love about Heather, and my blog posts are too short to list them all here so I’ll get straight to my favorite: Heather is the most dependable person I have ever met.  If she says she’ll be there, she will.  If she says she’ll do something, just consider it already done. 

I don’t know if you have a friend like that (and if you don’t, I suggest you try to “friend” Heather on Facebook, because everyone would benefit from a person like her in their life), but if you do, then you know that the very last thing you’d want to do to a person like that is let them down.  That is exactly the part of my friendship with Heather that I thought about yesterday as I was leaving for my 6 mile run.  No, I wasn’t going to meet Heather on a corner and go for a run together.  Actually, Heather and I live over 200 miles away from each other and have only ever run together once(and lesson learned: there is nothing more fun than going on a run in the woods with Heather and her dog Gunther.  I guess that fantastic people end up owning fantastic dogs :-

).  I was thinking about Heather because I didn’t want to go on my run at all.  Just last week I found out that I had been accepted into the NYC Half Marathon on March 16^th, and being the math whiz that I proclaimed to be in paragraph 2, I quickly calculated that I was a good two weeks behind on my current training plan to be ready for what was going to be my first race of the season.  My long run needed to be 6 miles, but it was about 23 degrees outside not including the wind chill factor.  When I first started running about 4 years ago, I’d run in any weather conditions, but there seems to be a direct correlation between my increasing age and the absolute coldest temperature that I am willing to run in.  And 23 degrees not including the wind chill factor was probably my cut off about 2 years ago.

I didn’t want to run, but I knew I had to.  I couldn’t run with Heather and Gunther, so I did the next best thing.  I sent an email (well, to Heather.  Gunther is amazing, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have an email account).  I wrote Heather an email saying I had to run 6 miles, I didn’t want to, yada yada yada.  I did this because I knew that if I didn’t send her a second email within the next hour or so saying that I had done it, my dear friend was going to drive over 200 miles down to me just to drag me out of my house and make sure I did my run (I’m telling you – fiercely reliable).  I told her I would do it, so I knew that then it was a matter of just getting it done.

I’ll spare you the details, but of course I did it.  It was cold and windy.  It was hard to breathe or feel my toes (OK, so I won’t spare you all the details).  But, I did it.  And after I returned, stretched, ate, showered and changed, I went to my email and sure enough there was a response from Heather.  It simply said “How did it go?”  Heather knew that if I told her I was going to do something that I would (I can be pretty reliable myself, thank you very much), and if I didn’t do it, I would need to answer how it went and the only way that I could was by going to do it.

My drawing "Sonic Boom"

Like I said, Heather and I have been friends for almost 30 years.  We’ve gotten a lot from each other.  I got her into soccer, she taught me to drive a stick shift.  We have been undefeated partners in Pictionary for almost 3 decades (it helps that I can draw something as horrendous as a circle with a line coming out of it and Heather can look at it and yell out “Sonic Boom!”), and have maintained an over quarter century tradition of writing birthday poems for the other person that every single time has contained the line “And sometimes little birds go ‘cheep’“ (long, drunk story).

 I don’t know about you, but I will let myself down way faster than I will let down a good friend.  Often I can motivate myself, but when I can’t I just send an email to the best family I have ever chosen.

Our soccer team, San Francisco, 1991.  Heather is top row, 3rd from left.  I'm front row, 3rd from right