I Owe You One

There are friends who will pick up your kids at school while you wait in West Seattle for the locksmith to break into your car, and friends who will take you to the airport at four-thirty in the morning when your dad is dying in Florida. There are friends you can live with for a week in a small cabin and not kill each other. There are friends who you can not talk to for, like, five years -- and then one day they call you up and you start in right where you left off. There are friends who will buy your lunch and say, "Oh, you can get it next time," and you don't really keep track but you're pretty sure it evens out in the end. There are friends who will forgive you your trespasses, and friends who will carry your secrets to the grave. There are friends who will come over and put your toddler to bed while you go to the hospital and have a miscarriage. There are friends who will listen to you whine your same whines over and over and still love you, and friends who will hold your feet to the fire and make you get your act together. There are friends who will drop a life-changing book or movie off on your porch at just the right moment. There are friends who will stay up all night rubbing your back and cleaning up your barf and telling you you're doing great, while you pant and groan and push a baby out of your body. Twice.

And there are friends -- these same friends, indeed -- who will come over on a gorgeous summer Saturday and spend three solid hours searching every inch of your not-inconsiderable mass of hair for tiny crawling insects...


...and tell you they're loving every minute of it, because you're holding so nice and still (unlike some people they could mention) and when was the last time you two had so much time to talk?


And even though (as you have discovered) you could drop the tweezers into your hair and have trouble finding them again, let alone a wily, wiggly louse -- there are friends who are such careful and thorough nit-pickers that you begin to believe that your head is not actually crawling with bugs, or they would have found one, at least.


And when these incredible people finally pack up their combs and clips and tweezers and magnifying glasses, and give you an enormous hug, and head back to their own families, you are left to ponder an eternal mystery (along with the question of where the month-old nits they did find came from, where the bugs that hatched out of them went, and why you are still feeling so dang itchy): What on earth have you done to deserve such friendship?

All you can really say to a friend like that is Thank you, Laurel. I owe you one.

P.S. I should make it clear that a) my dad is not now, nor has he ever been, dying in Florida. That was someone else's dad, long ago. And that b) I have dealt with the invisible lice question by dousing myself with poison shampoo and am now itch-free.