Toasting rye bread
Schultz, Valerie
TOASTING RYE BREAD Valerie Schultz I have heard that memory is 80 percent smell. I don't know if that is a verifiable percentage, but every time I put a piece of rye bread in the toaster, I think...
...We were in the same class...
...In the area to visit relatives, our family met at their cabin for dinner...
...I was astonished and laughed at her outrageousness...
...We were inseparable for five years until my parents unfeelingly decided to move...
...My head is full of cycles, my heart is full of love for every turn...
...They saw first-hand the living truth of Anne-of-Green-Gables "kindred spirits" and a glimpse of their mother as girl...
...Laurie wrote when her father died, making that instinctive grab for those you desperately care about who are still living...
...I was twelve years old when I discovered that toast didn't have to be white bread...
...Our friendship has lasted through subsequent moves, soul-searches, college degrees, fads, and grown-up adventures...
...We talked and laughed and caught up on the now-flown years...
...We argued vehemently, and just as vehemently stuck together...
...This morning, breakfasting on my rye toast, I realized that this was only one small way my best friend had broadened my horizons, and that that's one of the things best friends do best...
...I don't know if that is a verifiable percentage, but every time I put a piece of rye bread in the toaster, I think of Laurie...
...We demanded to know each other's innermost thoughts...
...But I always knew she loved me for who I was...
...They offer us affection solely for who we are, surprise us with the scope of another's existence, and teach us it's okay for toast not to be white bread...
...I tell my girls we had no VCRs, that we had to go to the theater to see a movie, and they ask facetiously, "Did you have electricity...
...I wrote with a wedding invitation, and the news of each new baby...
...Then she made me taste it, and I was hooked...
...But someday all of this may filter back through their memories, perhaps as they raise daughters who have best friends and recall their own childhood best friends...
...Laurie has been a poet, a reporter, an artist in Mexico, a forest ranger in remote cabins...
...Last summer we met for the first time in twenty-two years...
...I always felt a bit of a potted geranium in a window box next to her rambling wild rose...
...We introduced husbands and children, and in a way, ourselves...
...My most recent letter from Laurie said that she'd left the Forest Service, gained a husband, and was living in Portland, Oregon, in a cedar house they called their "urban cabin...
...Best friends beckon us to come out from the shadow of our mom and dad...
...As I described the insight our childhood friendship had afforded me into the lives of my daughters, I realized they gained something from us now as they watched twenty-two years-twice or more their lives-melt away...
...They show us we have separate lives...
...All the parenting books on my shelf cannot make me feel the tug of a best friend "breaking up" with you, or the delight of the intimacy of a day at the lake that you know will never end...
...she was toasting rye bread...
...We spent every free moment together...
...Two old friends embraced, shared photos, got to know husbands and children...
...Certainly that was Laurie and I. Our friendship existed in a premen-struation, preboyfriends, prerebellion pocket of childhood...
...I know you want a white picket fence," she would chide me...
...Sometimes I think I am not really old enough to be on the other side of all this...
...We finished each other's sentences...
...It was as consuming as monogamy...
...I now watch my four daughters grow and blossom into their own kinds of flowers, and I remember Laurie...
...she answered about every five years...
...We had the same passions...
...She used to criticize my dreams of romance for being too mundane...
...For many years our actual communication has been sporadic...
...For safe delivery, I have usually mailed letters to her mother's house...
...Our friendship began when we were the only two new kids in the third grade of a closely-knit Catholic school...
...Her return address has always been a surprise, leading to the many crossouts that eclectic friends make in an address book...
...Aristotle's definition of friendship is the image of one soul dwelling in two bodies...
...Our relationship turned out to be excellent preparation for marriage...
...And yet my sometimes cloudy, sometimes lovely, sometimes fierce memories of childhood are really all I have to draw on as I try to raise my daughters to be kind, honest, and full of heart...
...We were on the verge of everything...
...We sat together in the lunchroom, eight-year-old victims of ostracism, and our mutual protection soon turned to camaraderie...
...We had little room in our hearts for other acquaintances who didn't know our codes...
...I was sleeping over at my best friend Laurie's house when I first smelled the sharp, singed-caraway aroma of rye toast...
...I hear them coordinating outfits, hashing over other girls, angling for more time together, picking apart their appearance, their goals, their plans, their parents, siblings, attempting to distill their own exact essences, just as we once did...
...To my daughters, we are old...
...I have thought of her more and more over the years, although our contact was less frequent...
...They barely see the point of being almost forty...
...Valerie Schultz is a free-lance writer who lives in Tehachapi, California...
Vol. 123 • May 1996 • No. 10
