Kitty’s Place

My fellow is away at a conference thingy so I am puttering about and half watching “My Best Friend’s Wedding”. It just ended and I am sitting here in tears and giggling at the same time, thinking about Tom. How I miss that man. He was my best friend and we had so much fun together. I hate shopping but we shopped like crazy, he had great taste even if tended to the bizarre at times, like with the sweater he bought that had Guatemalan worry dolls sewn all over the front of it. *laugh* We spent afternoons in my dining room, dancing to Prince and the soundtrack from Dirty Dancing. I wore a big sweater that hung off one shoulder and he mimicked Prince. Little Red Corvette always makes me cry now. Once when I was bemoaning the fact that I could not get pregnant, he offered to paint instructions in picture form on our bedroom ceiling so my husband and I could get it right. *laugh* He made work fun and days off a blast. He would leave little scraps of paper in strange places at work, of a little happy face with cat ears, just because.

After Tom moved away we stayed in touch for a while, I crosstiched him an 18×24 picture of purple irises, because he loved them. Once I found a wall hanging with little Guatemalan worry dolls sewn on it and I mailed it off to him. I carried a dozen little notes in my wallet that he had written to me during morning report, little pictures, funny remarks. His picture sat on my dresser and every day I missed him a little more and wished that we could live in the same city again. I visited him but he had a new lover and even though he was a very nice fellow, it was obvious that I did not fit in with their life. Time passed and we lost touch, not because I stopped, because he did. I remember days when I would be out at the mall and would see cool shoes, a trendy shirt or something else that reminded me of him and I would try again to get in touch, but to no avail.

One day I was out and ran into a mutual aquaintance who told me that Tom had aids and did not want to have contact with any of his old friends. I cried for days after hearing that news, remembering how we had read about aids when we had our first patient, how we hated the way aids patients were treated like pariahs and how we did all we could to raise awareness about the disease, how Tom left to move to the big city and work on the first aids unit in the country.

A few years ago I was having day stay surgery and in the recovery room I was attended by another mutual aquaintance. He was the one who told me that Tom had died a few days earlier. I never got to say goodbye and to this day, many years after the fact, I miss him. But I remember him with smiles and laughter, because that is what best friends give most to one another. *smile*