Lucky

If we are fortunate while we are on this planet, we cross paths with people who first become friends but, somewhere along the way, become something more. The lines blur, borders slide, and before we know it, they are family.

We connect by choice, not by a double helix.

I don’t know exactly when this happens. Is it sudden? Gradual? Fate? Luck? Can we pinpoint the moment when that diaphanous divider between friend and family dissipates, or do we only realize it long after it has happened?

I ponder this quite a bit.

My mother always knew when I was lost in thought. Even long past childhood, she recognized a very specific look on my face. Bonnie was so viscerally intuitive it bordered on uncanny. I swear she could even see that look when we spoke on the phone.

Joe actually captured it once with his ever-present Minolta SRT 101. We were on the front porch of our home in Trenton on an autumn afternoon, the kind when the colors of the trees seemed almost impossible in their brilliance against a watercolor sky of steel blue.

The young girl in the photograph looks serious, almost unapproachable, as though she were guarding something of herself from the world. I can’t remember why I was so lost in thought. But I can remember him calling my name and looking up. Then the click of the shutter.

Bonnie saw beyond that solemn expression. She saw something softer, some nuance the camera could never capture but a mother would recognize. She kept the photograph framed on a shelf, always within sight.

Bonnie and Joe raised me with a razor-sharp sense of right and wrong. Was I spoiled? Yes. Was I overindulged? Absolutely. But was I a brat? Absolutely not. That would never have been tolerated.

I don’t know exactly how they did it, but they instilled in me a compass whose north never wavered from doing the right thing, whether I liked it or not. And it wasn’t just about behavior. There were manners, responsibility, consideration, tasks—the motherlode of obligations.

I am hardwired that way, even when I sometimes wish I weren’t.

I don’t have children, but I’ve been around plenty of them, and I still marvel at how Bonnie and Joe managed to spoil me without raising a spoiled child. Somehow, even when I was very young, I understood that whatever they had given me could just as easily be taken away at the first sign of ingratitude, bad behavior, or all-around brattiness.

But the most important thing I grew to understand was how much other people mattered. I mean really mattered. Their feelings. How I treated them. Kindness. These things were paramount.

Maybe that is where my empathy came from.

So, as I sit at my writing desk, I imagine I have that same expression that Joe captured decades ago, the one Bonnie always loved. I find myself reflecting on how I see my friends and those who have become family. And it is a very specific way.

I imagine holding them carefully like priceless porcelain dolls, treasuring each one for their beauty, their quirks, their singularity, and placing them in luxurious velvet boxes deep inside my heart.

I feel things deeply when it comes to the people I love. When one of them is hurting, some part of me hurts with them. I carry a little piece of what they are going through with me. Not because I choose to. I just do. I think that is part of loving people—at least it is for me.

I had every intention of recounting another story in this post. In fact, I had written one about our family’s unusual lexicon. There are always stories waiting in the wings. Funny ones. Sappy ones. And my father’s slides and photographs are an endless source of inspiration.

But as I write this, someone I love is dealing with a very significant health issue. And today, as it has been ever since she told me, all I could think about was her.

So this is for her.

In this case, there was no moment when the line between friend and family was crossed, because we were always family. I remember her for as long as I can remember anything.

I have told her how much she means to me, but perhaps there are some things worth saying more than once. We have been there for each other through the good, the difficult, and everything in between.

I treasure the times we have shared—the laughter, the history, the stories—but mostly, the love.

And though I cannot make things better for her, I can write about her. I can remind her of what she means to me, even if she already knows.

Because when someone has been in your life long enough, they become woven into it. You cannot tell your story without telling some of theirs.

She appears in my father’s treasure trove of images. She lives in memories and stories told over dinner. She remembers people I loved who are no longer here. She knows versions of me that no longer exist and, somehow, still recognizes the person I have become.

She knew me before I knew myself. And there is something profoundly beautiful about being known that way.

Out of all the people we could have encountered during our brief time on this blue and green spinning marble in space, somehow our lives found one another.

Maybe it was fate. Maybe it was luck. Maybe, in the end, it doesn’t really matter.

Some people simply become part of your story.

And if you are very lucky, you become part of theirs.

Danielle Barber

Author’s Note: This blog supports a memoir-in-progress. The essays published here stand on their own and do not represent the full narrative, which continues to unfold.