What You Think About at 4 a.m.

 My cat and my bladder decided that I needed to be awake at 4 a.m. this morning. Naturally, I couldn’t go back to sleep and just laid there … thinking, and a long-lost memory popped into my head. A tragedy that I had forgotten about until now.

I was around 11 and was living with my guardians, Aunt Verta & Uncle Eddie. We were on a family trip to upstate New York, somewhere around Watertown, I think. A relative of Uncle Eddie had a farm there and we went for a visit during the summer. I can’t remember how long we were there; in a children’s mind, it seemed like the whole summer but was probably more like a week.

I remember that we took the 1,000 Island bridge across and naturally had to stop at the Never Never Land on Hill Island. The entrance was a bunch of books with Humpty Dumpty sitting on top (I had to look this up, I did remember Humpty Dumpty) 

It was a pretty lame place but for kids rather fun. There were large nursery rhyme statues throughout the park, some even scary like the witch from Hansel & Gretel and the big bad wolf. That was it but at the time it was new and exciting. The only thing that exists there now is the observation tower which we did not go up.

We had such a fun time at the farm. GH and I fed the cows and did other farm chores. We got to see the cows milked, rode on the tractor, and baled hay. To us, these were fun things to do, probably not so much for the cousins who had to do it every day. I can't remember if there were other children there but I'm assuming there were. 

There was also a lake there and we spent a lot of time fishing. I remember Uncle Eddie rowing us out on the lake and all I could catch were lake sunfish or “sunnies” as they were called. They were little fish full of bones and usually, you threw them back because they weren’t worth the work to eat. But after catching not but sunnies I was determined to eat one. So, I cleaned it and we fried it up. There wasn’t a lot of meat and a lot of bones but it was a good fish, very buttery tasting.

It was a great vacation until tragedy struck, and this is the part that I had obviously buried down deep until this morning. I remember a toddler drowned in the lake. The rescuers had brought his body up and were trying to revive him to no avail. The thing I remember the most was how blue he was. We were standing far away and I’m assuming that we were hustled away after that by the adults, but I remember.

Probably why I couldn’t go back to sleep.


 

My Best Friend Cindy

Have you ever seen the movie Beaches? Well, that’s the story of Cindy and me. Only Cindy was the Bette Midler character CC Bloom, the crazy one, she wasn’t supposed to be the one who died. 

Cindy and I met in grade six at Palm Beach Elementary and we bonded immediately. I had just moved down from Canada and was lonely. We had the same name, both were social outcasts at the school, we had a love of tennis, and we lived near each other. That school was brutal but we had each other. We had such a fun time; we’d sneak out at night and raid all the hotel pools near my house. We would play Monopoly for hours. We’d also sneak onto the Breakers Hotel beach and pretend we were staying there and get free sodas and food. Once, we were down at the beach around midnight having a BBQ and were discovered by a cop who sent us home. We were so scared! One Halloween we decided to trick or treat up in the north end of Palm Beach where all the mansions were. No one had candy so they gave us money, and we made out like bandits!   

Then I moved back up to Canada for a year. We corresponded by mail that whole time, keeping in touch with postcards and letters. Just like in the movie: CC and Hillary write to each other for years.

Then I came back to Palm Beach but she had moved to Rivera Beach, about 10 miles away, a long distance for 12-year-olds. We used to watch Here Come the Brides on TV every week; only talking during the commercial and sighing over Bobby Sherman. I found out later that it was a long-distance call but my mother never said a word. She thought of Cindy as another daughter. (We still had a crush on Bobby Sherman, one of my presents to her a few years back was a signed photo of him.)

We still saw each other on the weekends, often I would ride my bike to her house, a trip that would last over an hour, and my mother would pick me up on Sundays. You could do stuff like this back in the 70s. One of the best memories from that time period was when my mother took us to an elegant dinner the British Club was having for the sailors of the HMS Phoebe. Cindy and I were in evening attire and were the only females under 50. Just us and a ship full of sailors. Two of them asked my mum permission to walk us across the street to go bowling. We were in love! What a night. We were so heartbroken when we rode our bikes to the pier a few days later and the Phoebe was gone.

After that, I again went back to Canada for high school and didn’t come back to Florida until I was 20. Except for a visit when I was 18 with my roommate Cyndi Edwards. Yes, three Cindys. Reminds me of a funny story. We went to what they called a "pickup bar" you went there before you went to the disco and hopefully met a dance partner. There was this drunk guy trying to pick us up. He asked our names and we answered, Cindy, Cyndi & Cynde. He was so confused because two were blonde, but one blonde and the brunette had the same glasses. The next day we went to Disney World and confused the lady putting the names on the back of the mouse ears!   

Cindy, Cynde & Cyndi

It was funny that we had the same glasses but not unusual, it wasn't the first time. We tended to get the same cars by accident. We both had Geo Metros, Toyotas, Ford F150s, etc.

Again, we wrote and called each other regularly until I came back in 1979. By this time, she was in Palm Beach Gardens and I was in Boca Raton. I didn’t have a car at the time so my stepfather would drop me off at my grandmother’s house in West Palm Beach and Cindy would meet me there. She would spend time visiting my Nana Goossens (she loved my French Nana) and then we would spend the weekend at her place. Soon I got a car so I spent more weekends at her place, mostly being nursed through a bad off-and-on-again relationship. She had a lot of patience with me in those days. That was the disco era and we would go out dancing almost every weekend. Once, we were at our favorite disco and she disappeared, so I went looking for her. She had crashed a stag party in a private room!

I shouldn’t tell this story but it was a different time. One night after partying at the said disco we drove to her place (it was a block away) but then decided to go out again. We shouldn’t have been driving, we were both wasted. Just outside her condo she missed the turn and plowed into a stop sign. Luckily two guys were nearby and got us back on the road and we drove back home. She couldn’t find her house keys, so we climbed up the balcony and crashed in her room, fully clothed on our backs. Her mom came home and was livid and yelled “what happened” to which we both lifted up our heads and said, “we broke the car” and passed out.

After that our lives again went in different directions when I joined the Navy in 1983 and we were back to letter writing.

In 1985 I was stationed in Connecticut when I got the dreaded call that my mother was terminally ill with cancer. I was lucky that the Navy sent me home to take care of her. During the three months that I was home, Cindy was constantly by my side. When I had to go back to Connecticut, she decided to sell her condo and move up with me. At the time I was married but he was stationed in upstate New York and I saw him on the weekends. Her father and grandmother lived nearby so she wanted to spend some time with them. We drove up the coast in two cars, with her dog and connected through CB radios.

What were we thinking with those hairstyles??

We were roommates until I got off active duty in 1987. That was such a fun time, the two of us in a little cottage I rented outside the base. She was the manager of the Burger King on base. She had this insane dog, Alex and we had two cats, her Siamese, and my grey cat. She loved her Siamese cats. Alex used to bust out of the windows when we were at work. Finally, our neighbor babysat him during the day. 

She caused a funny scandal for me at the time. I was the only female working in the rigger’s loft and one of my friends was a guy named Mike. Everyone knew I had a roommate but I hadn’t mentioned her name. Mike met her and took a shine to her and they started going out. So everyone thought that Mike and I were having an affair because he would talk about being at my place, my cooking, his girlfriend Cindy, etc. We worked in a shop on the lower base where the subs were so Cindy wasn’t allowed down there because she was a civilian. Mike and I realized what was happening and thought it was rather funny. One night we had a department get-together at a local bar, Mike, Cindy and I walked in and we introduced her to everyone. You could see all the lightbulbs going off over their heads. It was rather funny.

She was allowed on the lower base once. We had a hurricane and I had to stay on duty and help protect the boats on our piers. I got permission for her to be with us so she wasn’t home alone. We didn’t have power for three days so we took showers in our building. We were so glad when we got home and saw a light on, but we weren’t so glad to discover that our electric water pump was working and we forgot to turn off the sink faucet. Water was everywhere.

Once we were watching a movie about Armageddon and people surviving a nuclear war. One of the scenes showed nuclear warheads coming up from the ground in the Midwest. Cindy said, “Man it must be terrible having warhead in your backyard.” It didn’t dawn on her that we did have nuclear warheads in our backyard. We lived right outside the base and the weapons bunkers for the subs were on the other side of our fence. She found that a little disturbing.

We missed Florida so the first winter we put flamingos in the front yard. That started a standing joke of us sending each other items with flamingos on them. (I have some flamingo fabric here that I was going to make into a pair of shorts for her to wear when she was better.)

One time I had concert tickets for us to see The Band. She was mucking out at the stables and forgot. She got home in time but didn’t have enough time to change. People around us kept sniffing their noses at her horse manure smell — I laughed because it was my revenge for her being late.   

I loved that little cottage. It was very tiny, the living room was the width of our little loveseat and had enough depth for a little hutch and bookshelf where the TV was. I had a little desk next to the bookshelf where my sewing machine was. We had insulated the outside patio and she had a waterbed in there to keep her warm. There was a window over the kitchen sink into the patio that we kept open so she would get some heat from the furnace. She still had to walk outside from the patio through the front door to get into the cottage which was awkward in the snow. It was cozy.

Fast forward to our 30s. Both of us were married and she has three small children. One day I received a phone call from her husband Steve, Cindy had collapsed and she is having her lung removed. There was a cancerous tumor in her bronchial tube that caused her lung to collapse. She said it was actually a blessing because if the tumor hadn’t been there and collapsed her lung, she would not have known she had cancer until it was too late. This was her second bout with cancer, she had skin cancer in her early 20s. We did spend a lot of time at the beach in our youth.

Like a scene out of Beaches, I called my (now ex) husband and told him I was leaving for Florida now and drove straight through from Virginia. I joked that our roles had been reversed because CC had driven pell-mell to be at Hillary’s side.

Over the years we’ve traveled together. We took a trip up the California coast by train to Hearst Castle; spent the night on the Queen Mary; visited our favorite places on Earth: Disney World and Disneyland, many times. We’d get matching mouse ears — we were kids again there. I told her the next time we would go to Disney we’d rent scooters and zip around from ride to ride. We loved, loved, loved Epcot. We would start in Canada and basically drink our way around the lake. Beer in England, sake in Japan, spiked coffee in France, and then margaritas in Mexico. We’d see the belly-dancing show in Morocco and then backtrack to France for dessert. The last time we were at Epcot one of the rides made me so sick, I mean green-in-the-face sick, which was odd because I don’t get motion sickness. She stood in line and got me some tums which didn’t work. She was so concerned for me, and kept sitting me down on the bench until the waves of nausea passed. Then suddenly I ran into the washroom and upchucked so badly, I mean, how did that much fluid come out of my body upchuck? After that I was fine and the drinking commenced! We always made sure that if it rained, we would head to the pub in England!

Our last trip at Epcot

We took cruises together, got drunk in Cabo, and saw the sites in Havana, Cuba. She flew out once to San Diego to go to a Jimmy Buffett concert with me. Best concert ever!

Jimmy Buffet concert

We had planned on another trip when the pandemic hit. That Cuba cruise would be the last time I would see her in person. 

After a family reunion in Quebec City, she flew up and we toured around Quebec and visited family in Montreal on our way to my hometown of Brockville. In all the years we were together she had never seen that side of my life except through letters. She fell in love with Brockville. We joked that when we were old and grey and widowed (because statistically, women outlive men) we would live together again and become snowbirds between Brockville and Florida. 

Cabo, Mexico

Quebec City, Canada

Havana, Cuba

We had a joke that the first one to get married got a case of champagne, and she sent me a case. She was there for me when I got divorced. She was there for me when I got remarried and came out to meet Bruce. When I was griping about the price of mangos in California, she sent me a box. She was always there for me. It's going to be so strange to not text or call her weekly. 

Her last text to me was “I love you” and an emoji of a cat. That’s Cindy, my best friend.