Laur n' Glor

I started a post-Thanksgiving tradition 23 years ago with the help of one of Grandma Rita's homemade yeast rolls, a generous helping of Aunt Virginia's stuffing, cranberry sauce and a schmear of mayo.  Me and gal pal, Laurie Geiser, sat at the table in the little apartment she shared with her big sister, our Turkey Day leftover constructions in hand, and chowed down.  In the throes of gluttonous pleasure, we experienced an epiphany of sorts as to the nature of that which we ate.  "Hey!" I exclaimed through a mouth of holiday goodness, "This is really a bread-on-bread sandwich!"  Grinning her agreement at the revelation, she gushed, "It i-i-s-s-s . . . and it's SO-O good!"  Her eyes rolled up into the back of her head as she finished chewing.  It was bonding at its finest.  And through the passage of years, boyfriends, jobs, marriage, kids, trials and triumphs, we've kept up our little shared foodie joke, reminding one another each late November of that belly-laugh moment in our young adulthood when everything seemed possible, when we seemed untouchable, when drama reigned and maturity feigned, and the promise of moving to New York together to pursue adventure was yet a beacon on the horizon.

But long before my posted picture on Facebook of this year's open-faced bread-on-bread sandwich appeared on Laurie's wall, and years before our interpretation of this food fact, we began an extraordinary friendship which would lead us both on an adventure of sorts, saving my sanity as a teen and setting my course for married life in the process.

Oddly enough, it began with a courtship and kiss with her big brother, of all people.  A courtship which consisted primarily of conversations -- not to put too fine a point on the word, as debate might be more apt here -- on the topic of religion and faith with my mother in the tiny front room of the converted mobile home trailer in which me, mom, and my three younger siblings lived in LaVeta, Colorado back in the summer of 1985.  That courtship, and my crush, came to a screeching halt with our first and final kiss.  I'm pretty sure that for both of us it was something akin to kissing a close relative.  Please pass the Scope!  We parted as friends.  Both of us with a knowledge of one another's families and lives stemming from the bits and pieces of chit-chat we had outside of his fascination with my mom's life and beliefs.

Being the curious girl that I was (and still am), it was no surprise to me that while hanging out at the local arcade -- one of those small game rooms situated in the back of Loaf n' Jug and 7-11 stores -- my radar sprung into action when a raven-haired beauty with a confident swagger accentuated by her well-fitting 501's walked past me.  I'd seen her somewhere.  No.  I'd seen a photo of her somewhere.  "Hey," I turned to ask one of the local teens next to me, "Is THAT Laurie Geiser?"  Before a response could begin to form in the kid's mouth, a husky modulated voice sounded behind me, an edge of menace lacing each carefully spoken word, "Yeah.  And WHAT OF IT?!"  Turning back to face her, I smiled and popped out with, "Oh! I'm Gloria Sweigard.  I know your brother?  Jerry?  He's told me all about you," I smiled even bigger, meaning every curve and tooth of it, "I've wanted to meet you for some time now."  I was no threat to her world; her guard came down immediately.  She, too, knew who I was.  And that was all it took to spark the connection between us that would carry two girls, Laur n' Glor, through Alaska, Israel, California, and back to Colorado after my high school graduation -- which she attended.  Thank you, very much!

In the beginning, Laur represented everything I wanted to be as an entering high school freshman.  And everything I wasn't allowed to be.  Or everything I didn't have with any degree of security.  The freedom to move about in a town where everybody knew her name, with the certainty that her familiar bed and family home and relatives up on the hill would all be there when she sank into her pillow and clicked on that bedside radio, the tunes of the day lulling her into comfortable sleep.  The freedom to experiment with varying shades of lipstick and eyeshadows -- all of which looked perfectly at home on her pretty face with its generous lips and almond-shaped eyes.  The freedom to listen to Prince & The Revolution on that aforementioned radio, reliving the concert scenes from his popular though corny movie, "Purple Rain" in one's head.  The freedom to be at home in her own skin . . . or at least as at home as a hormonal teenage girl can be given the variables which can afflict her soul.  When I stayed the night at her house, I drank in every moment, noticing every corner of every room and each piece of furniture and lamp and knick-knack, appreciative of the food to which I could help myself in the pantry and fridge, grateful for the friendliness of her parents (who I know call Uncle Jerry and Marie, or Mer).  In fact, I couldn't sleep.  I would lie awake next to her, awaiting the next song in the DJ's lineup, hearing her breath, imagining a life where I grew up with the familiar from year-in to year-out.

And she made me laugh.  Her own laugh was, and still is, highly infectious.  You'd have to be cut from the hardest stone not to be affected by her bubbly giggles and guffaws.  She could take my most tearful moments -- and I did have teary outbursts with alarming regularity in those first months of our friendship -- and turn them on their head, transforming my dark mood into a lighthearted breeze.  It was one of her many gifts and talents as a stellar human being.  Even then, on the periphery of adult awareness, I knew that about her.  And so did my mom.  Even when I railed against my mother internally, sharing these feelings with Laurie as teenage girls will do, my new friend was sincerely kind and respectful toward my mom.  And my protective mother, wary of the world and its influences, trusted Laurie with her daughter because of the character she felt she could see in this young woman so important to my existence.

When I moved away from LaVeta, and consequently Laur, first to the town of Walsenburg -- maybe a mere handful of miles for someone with regular access to a car and gas money, but it might as well have been the North Pole for me -- and later to the great state of Alaska -- more miles than I could stack in my arms and definitely not doable in the gas department, and clearly closer to the North Pole -- I took to letter writing.  Long letters.  Multiple pages.  Sometimes individual sheets of paper cut in wavy shapes, lined in magic marker, numbered and carefully folded before placement in an envelope and the acceptance of a stamp on it's top right corner.  But always full of emotion and fears and questions and connection.  (She would much later hand these letters over to me, thinking I might find them of use in some way, either to satisfy questions I may have had about myself as a teen at that time, or perhaps for writing, or both.)

Of all the many places I'd been and the many faces I'd met, Laur was the one thing, the one peer, that I couldn't let go.  Even when instructed to so so for the good of forgetting the past and moving on into the future.  No.  Keeping Laur in my life, even on the down low, meant that I continued to exist, that I was more than a shadow person flitting from one place to the next without leaving an imprint on nary a soul: in short, Laurie's friendship, the fact that she loved me as much as I loved her and wrote and called me, never forgetting me, either, was just the validation that a lonely and troubled teenager desperately needed.  There were several times where the desire for death darkened my heart and mind, and the solidity of Laur n' Glor kept me from fulfilling those desperate yearnings.

Roughly four years after our initial meeting, I made the decision to turn down a full-ride scholarship to college in California, opting instead to head for the familiarity of Colorado and Laur.  Little did I know that returning to her world would also set the course for my life as a wife and mother.  Seated in a chair in the living room of her big sister's apartment, where Laur took me straight from the airport, was her cousin, the boy I began seeing after my brief dalliance with her brother, the boy whose kisses reminded me not in the least of family but, instead, steamed up more than a few windshields on dates and double dates.  The boy who caused my heart to leap into my throat when he approached.  The boy who now stood before me, one of his legs encased in a cumbersome brace (he'd recently had knee surgery), his naturally curly hair bringing out the deep brown of his eyes, bolo tie snug against his neck, and wearing the heck out of that pair of pale blue jeans.  He shook my hand, holding onto it longer than was absolutely necessary or required, and I found that I needed a moment to push my heart back down into the proper cavity in my chest.  We would be married and expecting our first child in less than a year from that casual meeting.  Next March will mark 23 years of legal and loving union together for us.

As for Laurie, I would go on to live with her family in LaVeta, walking to the family-owned truck stop with her mother, where I waited tables for a time.  At the house, I made myself at home with Scrabble games, baking homemade cookies for her little brother, Jeremy, and visiting her grandma and other family members up on 'the hill.'  Later, I was given clearance to move into that small apartment with her and her sister, Annette.  I worked odd jobs.  Began to see Jimmy again.  Met the cousins.  Partied.  Had myself some of my own life experiences -- not all of them pleasant, a good many of them just plain stupid, but all of them exhilarating and attributable to me.  When I came up pregnant, Laur and her sister said I could stay with them, get an education and job, and they would help me raise the baby . . . if I decided that getting married wasn't a good idea.  Obviously, I decided against that.  There was tension between us for a time because one of the things which bonded us was our passion for the paths of our lives and the stubbornness with which we sought out those paths.  She worried that I was surrendering both my passion and my path.  She wasn't in my wedding though she was AT my wedding.  But as good friends do, we patched it all up, and sojourned on, marching forward into our adult lives with its countless unknowns, never once believing we wouldn't continue to be best buds for life.

And we have.  She has listened and loved.  Counseled and corrected.  Watched and wondered.  Her family accepted me into their fold even before my marriage to her cousin, and this closeness only strengthened between myself and her siblings and parents.  Later, this closeness flowed down into the other aunts and uncles and cousins, the grandma and great aunt and great uncle.  They all became as much a part of me as my own family, that in which I grew up and that expanse of extended relatives who have roots in central California.  I was accepted as the quirky person that I was.  That I am.  I learned about what comes with settling down and growing roots.  Where my practical knowledge of common issues in everyday life were lacking due to my unique nomadic childhood, Laur offered her insight and suggestions with assiduous concern.

I observed Laur with her sister and drew upon their relationship for the basis of the bond between my own children . . . and as an example through which to heal the wounds between me and my own sisters and brothers.  When my baby brother went to prison, more than once, and most painfully when I was forced to turn him in, Laurie comforted me and refused to judge my brother, still sending him cards of encouragement, as much for my sake as for his.  When my sister suffered a post-partum event which stripped her of her children, and her sanity for a time, effectively bringing about our own family holocaust, Laurie did not waver in her support, and her tremendous ability to empathize was put to the ultimate test.  There was a time when I put my trust in the wrong hands and caused her immediate family legal and emotional grief which I desperately attempted to rectify, and she stood by me though it put her in the immediate path of her beloved sister's temporary rage toward me.  We survived that.  All of us.

There have been births and weddings -- I was a bridesmaid in Laur's wedding AND I sang a lovely song a capella, enduring sweaty armpits and stained rings of satin (as opposed to rings of Saturn) -- along with deaths and funerals.  Great big parties abounding in food and family, friends and fun, to celebrate birthdays for kids and adults, high school graduations and holidays galore.  Before she had her own children, she doted on mine with genuine affection.  After she had her own children, she decided she wanted to add my son to her two-count!  Though our lives follow different courses, our common threads of compassion and the importance of family and friends, along with a shared love of chocolate, Mojitos and bread-on-bread sandwiches, link us at our cores.  We are women of substance and inner beauty, though our outward stuff ain't too hard on the eyes!

Distance now separates us, as it has at many points during our years as friends.  Laur resides in Wyoming.  I'm here in Tennessee.  But no longer is there an ocean, literal or figuratively, between us.  The history is too rich, and the shared experiences too precious, for anything other than love and admiration, one for the other.  My friendship with her opened me up to the possibilities of close friendships with other women.  So, I've added on, but never do I subtract.

But in a world of BFF's (best friends forever) and BBF's (best buds forever), Laur ranks high atop these as she is my oldest (um, not by age) and steadiest friend.  She intuitively gets me, all of me, because she was with me during a period of my life when most other folks entered through the front door and left out the back.  Or was that me?  She came on in.  And stayed.  Hiding under the bed if she had to, just to remain in my life.  Other people may know me, having had me as a classmate for a short stint in grammar school, but I was there, and then almost as quickly, gone, with no phone numbers or addresses in hand as I departed.        

So instead of the traditional sparkling wine toast, I hoist my stuffing-and-roll sandwich aloft as I salute Laur n' Glor -- two girls who made it big in this life in ways which fell outside of their young plans and dreams, in part due to their chance meeting once upon a time in a makeshift arcade, introductions made with the strained hum of Ms. Pacman in the background, far far from I-25 and the big city lights.  If you have any questions as to the validity of our closeness, might I direct you to these well-spoken words, "WHAT OF IT?!"