The Scribbled Note

This was not an out-of-the-blue request from the distant past. My sister and she have remained close all these years. And my sister is the one coordinating this book of memories. I couldn’t just ignore her request to participate.

The scribbled note sat on my to-do list for a while. Then later copied over to another when everything else on that list got done and was crossed out. At times, I would try to wipe away the cobwebs, try to remember our time as friends some 50 years ago. Afterall, what’s to be written is going to be in a book that will sit on a coffee table for a year, not just on some card that will be tossed away after a week on the mantel. I burdened myself with thinking about what it is from the memories of that time that is so formative, so important that it’s even worth mentioning now.

My note started off easily.

OK, so the math is easy… it’s your 65th birthday and we’ve known each other all of those years. Our families, sharing a backyard fence that kept them more together than apart, have interacted since before we were born. I think it’s great that you and my sister have shared such a close relationship over the years. Our time as friends was much shorter and so long ago.

Memories of that time flooded back. A childhood in the 50’s and early 60’s. It was a different time. Neighborhoods filled with kids playing outside their homes, nearly the live-long day and into the evening, largely without parental involvement. But, we all knew that neighbor parents had almost as much authority to discipline you as your own parents. But it wasn’t just a thousand eyes waiting to catch you doing something wrong. At its most fundamental level, there was security – a thousand eyes helping to make sure you were safe and that you felt that way.  I reflected on all this and more. My relationship with the birthday celebrant was closest or at least most memorable a few years later at that middle school / junior high school stage, an awkward and challenging time for any generation.

I then continued.

… it all comes down to a single, simple word – trust. At that stage of our lives - in the grade school and high school years - there was always a trust between us in what we shared. Throughout the 40 odd years since those days, trust is still one of the most important traits that I revere in the relationships that I most value today, and in the people I most respect. Frankly, I never connected this reverence for trusting and being trusted to how important and unique it was in our relationship while kids at that time. It simply was just there. Perhaps we took it for granted.

I wasn’t done.

I then thought about our lives since then, those times when each of us may have suffered a bit from being knocked around by life and those who betrayed a trust or should never have had it to start with. To be fair, she suffered much more than me. Mine were largely business relationships; hers were not.

But I couldn’t bring all that up. I deleted several lines where I tried to gently touch this. It is after all supposed to be a celebration and a time for good memories. But I wanted to honor the very positive impact of that trust that we shared. I simply wrote -

The occasion of your birthday has sparked for me this wonderful memory after all these years. Thank you.

I finished my note with a simple wish between old friends. But you’d have to open that book on the coffee table to read it.