Now, there is a question. The oldest friend I still have.
Her name is Connie Szczepanski, and I have known her since the fall of 1957, which means I have known her for sixty-eight years, which is a number that doesn't seem real to me no matter how many times I say it out loud. Sixty-eight years. Biscuit is eleven and I think of him as ancient. Lord knows what that makes Connie and me.
We met in the fourth grade at St. Patrick's School on Avenue K. I remember the day clearly, which surprises me because I can't tell you what I had for breakfast on Tuesday. Sister Agatha had seated us alphabetically, which put me, Mahoney, directly behind Kowalski, which is what Connie was then before she married Frank Szczepanski and gained about fourteen consonants. The first thing she ever said to me was whispered over her shoulder during morning prayers. She said, "Your pencil is rolling toward the heating vent." I looked down and she was right. I grabbed it just in time. I have always believed that Connie saved my pencil, and in doing so, saved a friendship that has now outlasted two marriages, four houses, one hurricane evacuation, and more than I could count of everything else.
We were inseparable in the way that only girls of that age can be, which is to say completely and without reservation and with a loyalty that had no language yet but was no less real for that. We walked to school together. We read the same library books and argued about them, which was, I think, the beginning of my understanding that you could love someone and disagree with them entirely and neither thing canceled the other out. Connie thought Jo March was selfish. I thought she was the only honest person in the whole book. We are still not fully resolved on this point.
She married Frank right out of high school. I went to college in San Antonio and came back changed in ways I couldn't explain and she accepted all of it without requiring explanation, which is its own kind of grace. When my marriage ended, she didn't ask questions. She drove over with a pot of bigos, which is this Polish stew her mother made, and she sat at my kitchen table and talked about other things until I was ready to talk about the right things, and that is exactly what I needed and somehow she knew it.
There is something about a friendship that has survived long enough to include who you were when you were young. Connie knew me before I had any idea who I was going to be. She knew the girl in the hand-me-down shoes and the young woman who came home from college with new opinions and the middle-aged librarian who went a little quiet for a few years and eventually came back to herself. She has a version of me inside her memory that I don't fully have access to anymore, and I find that comforting rather than strange. She is, in some ways, a record of me.
She lives in Houston now, has for thirty years, and we see each other four or five times a year and talk on the phone every Sunday, which is a habit we fell into sometime in the nineties and have never stopped. She has six grandchildren and I know all of them by name and have watched them grow up in the photographs she sends. Frank passed in 2019, and that was a hard year, and I did for her what she had done for me all those decades ago, which was drive over and sit at her kitchen table and talk about other things until she was ready.
I don't know what I would do without her, and I try not to think about it. What I think about instead is this past April when she came down to Galveston for the weekend and we sat on my back porch in the evening and watched the light go off the water and she said, completely out of nowhere, "I still think Jo March was selfish," and I laughed until my eyes watered.
Sixty-eight years. And she is still wrong about Jo March. Some things you just hold onto.
Share on...
