There was a trampoline.
There was a yellow VW bug with half broke windshield wipers.
There were piles of sugary junk food. Talking until past midnight under the stars. Laughing about senseless jokes that would give us stitches in our sides.
There was her smile. There were continuous waves of joy in the wackiness that our common energy created.
For about a year I’ve been thinking a lot about a friendship that I had when I was 16 and 17 that would fit perfectly the “as thick as thieves” description. We didn’t attend school together and we didn’t even live on the same side of the city. We met through a community theater group, in a part of the city in which neither of us were community members.
There is no record of her in a convenient-to-find yearbook. My photos I have with her are few and far between. And even though I spent countless hours at her house, I couldn’t even locate the neighborhood if I tried now.
She was one of the smartest people I knew, but a fact that only came to light when she casually mentioned her inability to hang out during the weekend because she had to go accept some honor that was being bestowed on her for her above average intelligence. We didn’t stay in touch past our first year of university.
I remembered her first name at some point in the last year – Tara. As soon as I remembered her name, her smiling eyes that flooded with light came rushing back to me and I was more drawn into my search. But her last name still escaped me. I quizzed my parents if they could recall what her last name was – but it was as if my connections to her were the thinnest, but strongest string I could imagine. We had very few acquaintances in common, and no other ties to name, but she was the closest person to my heart during those powerful, yet overly-dramatic teenage years.
And yet, my memory re-paints my last two years of high school as one in which we had an unbreakable bond – countless hours on the phone with each other (before cell phones and computers), countless afternoons exploring new parts of the city that we had only heard about, two-hour long breakfasts of bagels and coffee at a Perkins (local pancake house) where we’d leave the waitress a $1 tip, and evening after evening jumping on the big trampoline that took up her entire backyard and then just talking endlessly until the night stretched into morning.
We shared silly, stupid jokes really, that somehow we both found endlessly amusing: the kind my own son now repeats a dozen times a day laughing big belly laughs, when after the third reiteration I find myself annoyed and bored.
Tara and I both loved the movies, and we would engage in that dishonest, common teenage practice of buying a ticket for one movie and then theater hop when that movie finished, until we were completely bored out of our skulls.
I can’t recall the specifics of our conversations. I’m sure there was a ton about boys. Then there must have been a lot of discussion about college choice. And the rest…the rest was just light and joy.
These last few months, I’ve felt the desire to track Tara down. Maybe it was the desire to see what became of that light and joy. But the task of tracking her down seemed impossible when I couldn’t remember a last name, couldn’t remember an address, couldn’t remember a common friend who would know her. She had no siblings and I could not recall her parents’ names.
The only thing I remembered about her that might track back to a public record was that Tara had childhood cancer and she had been involved closely with a camp in the Rochester area. I Googled her first name and the name of the camp.
The first Google entry that appeared was an obituary for Tara Houndt. I remembered her last name.
Tara passed away almost a year to the day that I finally tracked her down. I don’t know the circumstances of her death. I don’t know what has been compelling me during this past year to track her down. I do believe there is an element of spiritual mystery here.
I now know a little about what she did with her life since the last time I saw her. She lived 39 years.
I start to wonder, “What would I have done with my life if I had only 39 years to live it? What if last year was the last year of my life?”
And there is an answer. The answer is that I would live it in full lightness and joy. I would laugh at stupid jokes, see all the movies I could, eat lots of junk food, jump for hours on a trampoline. Share my deepest self with somebody until the wee hours of the morning. And then when the years for me to become a serious adult arrived, I would find a way, every single day, to live in lightness and joy.
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