Old Friends Are the Best Friends

Gentle Readers: Before I was a college professor, I was a nurse.

I went to nursing school in Charlotte, N.C., run by the Sisters of Mercy--who had none. My suite mate, Therese, was from Mt. Airy, NC, a small town like the one in Georgia I was born in, White Oak. Her father had died in middle age, leaving her mother to raise a troop of Catholic children on a railroad widow's pension.

Therese nursed until she was 30, when, lo, this fellow appeared in the kitchen of her roommate's apartment in Texas, where she lived then, to give her a big kiss after pinning her to the frig.

They married and have four sons who live in Texas, all commodity traders.

The interesting thing is that this guy who pinned Therese to the frig to kiss her was the son of an oil man. When his father died, he became very rich.

And so it was that Therese has homes in several cities. The fun thing about the current life of Therese is that when she and her husband move from home to home in different cities, they just leave everything behind wherever they are, including their clothes.

They have recently established an art museum in their palatial home in the little Texas town where they raised their family. They have given it up to the town as a museum. I hope some people visit it, but I am not sure those Texans are art fiends.

I have never lost contact with Therese completely; she turns up from time to time. My husband and I visited her and her spouse in their up-scale digs in Sarasota when last they visited that particular home--with all the clothes left in the closets when they exited.

Her husband twitted us for driving my old Mercedes because of how wicked the Germans were. God knows how many cars he has.

Old friends are the best friends.Therese today is the same Therese who exited a little North Carolina town to go on to Texas and marry an oilman's son and become very rich but stayed the same Mt. Airy girl she was when we were suite mates in nurses' training.

I keep in touch with old friends. They keep me in touch with my roots and how I became the person that I am. lee


Letters to Therese:

I found a note to myself saying, “Don’t forget to tell Therese about the Belmont Abbey fellow on the elevator.” I forgot with my first letter.

Here it is:

I got on the elevator, and there was a big old fellow with a collard-greens-and-salt-pork-fried-chicken belly on board. He had a big box that he was toting because he was evidently going home.

“Headed home?” I asked.

“Shore ‘ nuff,” he responded.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“North Carolina,” quoth he.

“I went to school in North Carolina,” said I.

“Me too,” he came back.

“Where?” I asked.

“Belmont Abbey,” he replied. “Where did you go to school?”

“Mercy Hospital School of Nursing,” I said

.

“We used to date Mercy girls,” he said. “Do you remember any of the names you fellows you dated?”

“Skip Somebody dated my suitemate, Therese Browne,” I returned (that was the little creep who called me up for a date to aggravate you). But,” I continued, “the sisters warned us about dating Belmont Abbey boys.”

“How come?” he asked.

“The nuns said the Belmont Abbey boys were wicked: that they were only interested in one thing.”

He let out a whoop of glee and almost dropped his box in his exultation. You couldn’t have told him that he had just become a Nobel Laureate and got a bigger display of joy.

That’s just like a man. They want to think they are the greatest hunters and gatherers of woman kind since the glaciers of the Pleistocene Ice Age retreated. Even if they are on IV Viagra and require a pulley to lower them into coital position, they still nurture the conviction that they are Mr. Sixty-minute Man supreme. (That song was popular the year we went into training, remember. Sister Carmel used to run through the dorm halls yelling, “Turn that terrible song off girls!”)

I wasn’t sharp enough to ask Mr. NC box-toter his name. But if he has relatives in our condo, he’ll be back, and I will trap him.

I think that was Skip you were dancing with in the picture I shared with you when we last met. I have forgotten the boy I dated for that dance. He was a numbskull.

How the years have flown. How recent that dance seems. How much you still look like the girl in that picture, Therese.

lee

4/5/2009

Dear Therese,

I have been meaning to write you a long time. But I couldn’t locate your address. I finally found one of yours and Malouf’s cards.

Your museum is impressive. I only hope it will have clients. The yokels in the Bay Area where we live prefer tractor pulls to Matisse. I don’t think Texans’ aesthetic sense is much above the tractor-pull level. C students fill the world. If you are unlucky enough not to be a C student, it’s best to hunker down and not call attention to yourself.

I was also glad to learn that y’all had sold your Donald Trump digs. What a shit that guy is. He’s a serial womanizer, and Dolly Parton has better taste than he has. Look at those gaudy buildings. Look at that hair. Better to put that money into art work for unappreciative Texans than to swell his coffers to skirt chase and go bankrupt yet again.

Things are going fine with me and Tom. True, he has had depression for over a year, but he’s coming out of it. I thought I was back at Seton Institute. Men married to nurses are lucky. We know how to do everything when they are sick physically and mentally. I am fine. I had a stent put in for angina. Heart problems are standard for my family. I would feel guilty if I didn’t have some kind of coronary bona fides. When my cousin Shirley, who’s the family genealogist, and I tour the family cemetery in Burnt Fort at the dinner on the grounds and service in the little church that my family established in the 1800s, if I point to a monument and ask, “Shirley, what happened to him?” She always responds, “Honey, he just fell dead.” Heart or stroke.

The church was Episcopal until the low-IQ family apostates commenced going to camp-ground meetings with Elmer-Gantry-type preachers. The apostates outbred the phlegmatic Episcopaleans. Now on dinner-on-the-grounds days, we have an itinerant preacher who yodels at us the whole service about how we are going to hell for various Baptist-type infractions that Episcopalians are too sophisticated to notice.

My Catholic husband exits the service in a state of shock that doesn’t wear off until we get back to Madeira Beach.

Come to see us when y’all are next in Sarasota. Tell me all the gossip and what those Catholic third-floor cats of your clan are saying mean about any members of our class. They tried to get you to desert me and move up with them for the whole time we were in nurses’ training. Now they are doubtless badmouthing anybody who’s had a divorce in our class.

Dreadful cats they are.

Our school board in Hillsborough County is run by a bunch of crooks. I keep on them in my blog: leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch. Blogspot.com;