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Finally catching up with an ‘old friend’

4 min read

It was a day when years’ worth of “someday” turned into an actual road trip and a visit.

For decades, I’ve been exchanging emails and Christmas cards with a favorite college professor. Mrs. B’s classroom was the first I walked into my freshman year at Cal U. She was cute and petite and was in such complete control of the class I decided maybe I wasn’t cut out for college work.

It was an oral communications class, a more sophisticated take on public speaking. By then, I’d done enough public speaking that standing in front of a class of similarly skeptical teenagers was not as daunting as the thought of pleasing this professor.

But please her I did, apparently, as I got an A-minus in the class.

We stayed in touch after graduation. A loyal reader of my column, she’d send emails about something I’d written and I’d write a few words back.

So the planets lined up last weekend and the farmer and I took a long road trip to her home in Greene County. Days like that are made for drives down long stretches of unfamiliar roads to see an old friend.

I hesitated to write those words, old friend. New friend is more accurate, because this began as a teacher-student relationship, with her in command at the front of the classroom and I just one of many looking up to her. By nature, it’s not a context that’s very conducive to friendship.

For years, I addressed her as Mrs. B, and she always signed off with her first name. I resisted because it felt too familiar, like I was crossing a line.

All the formality was finally dispensed with Sunday when she opened the door and gave me a hug. She looked the same – cute and petite and with the same perfect diction I remembered from the classroom.

And so we sat as friends in her sunroom, catching up while my farmer and her husband toured his prodigious vegetable garden. She asked about my kids by name, and asked after my parents. She’d been keeping track of us through our letters, and my column, for all these years.

But something surprised me. She told me about the lives of some of my college classmates – their children, their parents, their careers. Turns out I was not the only student she turned into a friend.

I read a really good book a few years ago, called “Father Joe.” It’s the true story of how, as a teenager, humorist Tony Hendra was befriended by a kindly monk, and how their friendship endured through many decades. The book was the recounting of conversations between the two, with the author an oftentimes confused and wayward soul and the monk a calming and wise chum. After Father Joe died, Hendra learned that the monk had also been a friend and confidant to many others, including Princess Diana. Princess Diana. And here he’d thought he was the only one.

Somehow, I’d assumed I was Mrs. B’s only student friend. I suppose a friendship developed mostly in the isolated vacuum of written words back and forth will have that effect, but some people have the talent of making you feel like you’re special, even when you really aren’t. Turns out Mrs. B has been keeping track of a lot of her students.

By the time the guys returned to the house (the farmer’s arms laden with tomatoes), Mrs. B and I had been happily chatting for more than an hour. I left feeling like I could have talked to her for hours more. As friends, after all this time, as friends.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.

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