This photo is almost four years old and was taken a couple days after my 50th birthday, but it contains three of my favorite people, two of whom have birthdays right beside each other. Silvia’s is the 9th of June, and Kim’s is the 10th of June. The young lady in the back is Silvia’s daughter, Constanza.
We’re born into our families, and we can add children of our own to those families, but friends choose us and choose to stay in our lives out of a special kind of love. I was blessed with three phenomenal friends in the course of my lifetime. Amy, the one I met in college, passed away only a week before this photo was taken. Silvia and Kim came into my life in very different ways and at very different times, but they are the two friends who I love more than any others.
In honor of them and the love I have for each, I want to share the stories of how we met and the many reasons I love them and am so happy to know them.
Silvia was the first exchange student I ever hosted. She came to live with us when I was only 28 years old, so she and I are only a decade apart in age. In retrospect, I was a bit young to be hosting, but I was a Spanish teacher, so I had experience dealing with teenagers and I had the ability to help her with the language barrier if she’d had any. My now ex-husband hadn’t wanted to host, but he’d relented only on the basis that whoever we hosted also had to like horses, so when Silvia’s application showed her riding a horse on a beach in Mexico, he reluctantly agreed to take her in. She never did become the horse aficionado he wanted, but he ended up liking her because Silvia is impossible not to like.
What’s funny, though, is that Silvia applied to become an exchange student because her mother couldn’t handle her anymore and wanted her out of the house for a year, so she’d grow up. I didn’t know this until years later. I wouldn’t have hosted someone who had become such a problem for her own parents that they were sending her out of the country! They kept that little tidbit out of the application. I’m glad they did. I never saw any contradictory behavior out of Silvia during her stay here. She made many friends of the right kind of people, and I never worried about what she was doing when she wasn’t home. She’s only later confessed to a couple “naughty” things she pulled with friends, but they were very tame things in comparison to what some kids do, and her parents back home were so happy with how she spent her year here and how much she matured.
Because of the great experience I had hosting Silvia, I went on to host again and again. If that first one had been a bad one, I wouldn’t have hosted again. When I sent Silvia home, I did expect to stay in touch with her, but I never expected her to become the friend she’s become. That happened because of a tragedy.
Three years after her return, and one day after my brother got married, Silvia called me early in the morning. I was surprised yet very happy to hear from her, but her voice seemed small and far away. Suddenly, she said, “My parents died in a car accident.” I remember sitting on the end of the bed with the phone pressed against my ear, uncertain if I’d heard her correctly and then uncertain what to say. She was so far away in Merida, Mexico, and the two people who had loved her so much that they’d sent her away into my care to grow up were now dead, and I couldn’t even get to her that day if I’d wanted to. I’d often spoken to her parents, but I’d never met them. I’d planned to because I’d thought I had plenty of time to meet them someday when I could get down to Mexico for a visit. Sometimes I can still hear their voices. How I wish I’d met them.
Their deaths, though, led to me eventually going to Mexico to attend a large family wedding with Silvia and her sisters to meet all her extended family in the town where her parents had grown up. That visit led to other visits, and what began as me being there as a sort of second mom to Silvia turned, over time, into me visiting as a friend and then as a best friend.
Silvia has been here often, too, and she has brought Constanza with her. A few years ago, they came for a two-year stay, so Silvia could attend college and finally get a degree. That stay ran into a third year, but then she got sick and her kidneys failed her. She returned to Mexico in November of 2020 to continue dialysis and hope for a transplant. Fortunately, she got a new kidney, and things are finally looking up for her again. Due to Covid restrictions and her medical problems, we haven’t seen each other face-to-face since she left, but I hope to change that within the year. We’ve had longer stretches of time transpire between visits, but I miss her. No matter the length of time, though, we always take right up as though it were only yesterday that we last saw each other. That’s what best friends do.
Kim and I briefly met the very day after he left his wife and the town (and house) where he’d lived for 57 years. We were at a Legion Rider event and had escorted a bus of veterans to a supper. I didn’t know who Kim was because he and I were then members of different groups, but there was a horrid little polka group playing, and he said something to me along the lines of “Wanna dance?” and I replied with a laugh that I did not want to dance. Then, a few minutes later, I happened to be going through the food line right in front of him, and he made a second lame joke asking if I’d get his plate for him, too. I recall looking at him oddly and saying, quite firmly, “No” before moving down the food line and then joining the riders I knew at a table to eat. I didn’t think any more about him that night.
A few days later, I went to the local park to take part in my Legion Riders’ poker run. Lo and behold, but who shows up for it? Kim. It was obvious that many of the members of my group knew him because he chatted with them. I still didn’t know who he was, but I recognized him as the strange guy who asked me to polka and then get him food. Good grief. The ride was about to start, so I went to my bike and got on. As I pulled into the road to the leave the park, guess who was riding alongside me. Yep. Kim. (I thought it was a coincidence, but years later, he finally told me that he made sure to be riding next to me when we left the park.) He waved, and I waved back, and off we went. When we reached our first stop in Chambers, he finally officially introduced himself to me, and I reciprocated. From there, we chatted at each stop and had lunch together and with the commander of his group and the commander’s wife, two people who I’ve come to know well since then. I learned during our little visits that Kim had just left his wife and that he was going to file for a divorce. Since I had fresh experience with that process, I shared some things I’d learned from my divorce, and most of our conversation centered on that. When we finished the ride, Kim offered to flip off my ex-husband as he rode past the house where he lived on his return to Norfolk. I accepted his offer and his phone number because we had agreed it would be nice to have someone to go on rides with because I wasn’t really keen on riding alone but I wanted to go on some long rides, and he wanted to revel in his newfound freedom and go on some long rides, too.
Thus, a friendship based upon our mutual love of motorcycles and our mutual dislike of the way we’d been treated in our marriages grew. That’s all it was for a while. I certainly had no desire to be any man’s rebound relationship, and I wasn’t looking for anything long-term, either; I was just enjoying my own freedom. But, at the core, Kim and I are very similar, and we grew to love each other. Many assume — very wrongly assume — that I was the cause of his divorce, but nothing is further from the truth. It was just very strange timing in the way we met only days after he left.
Since meeting Kim, we have had lots of great adventures. Probably one of his biggest, though, was the very first time he ever left the United States. So far, it’s still the only time he’s left the U.S., but I hope to remedy that within a year or so and get him to Italy. However, he went with my daughter and me to Mexico to meet Silvia for the first time.
He didn’t know any Spanish or anyone there, but he willingly went along and took every adventure in stride. He swam in a huge cenote and in the gulf waters with me for my second time swimming with whale sharks near Holbox Island. He helped Silvia fix a few problems at her house, and he tried every new food that came his way. His favorite thing might have been sitting in the back of Silvia’s car as she drove, with the window down, and shouting “I love tacos!” for all to hear as we passed by. So embarrassing. Ha ha.
He and I have been to Washington D.C. and New York City where we were five years ago today with my children for Kim’s 60th birthday which we spent eating at a restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen and then attending a baseball game at Yankee Stadium.
We went to San Francisco
and Los Angeles together and spent a ton of money on an Uber driven by a guy who didn’t speak English, yet who still managed to get us to Griffin Observatory, so we could look out over L.A. and also see the Hollywood sign.
We also endured the craziest van ride from the Hollywood walk of fame to Rodeo Drive where we decided to exit the ride and take our fate back into our own hands. We’ve been to Nashville
and Asheville
and to parts all around Johnson City, Tennessee, including a drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway where a black bear ran across the road in front of us. We’ve ridden our bikes from Branson down into Arkansas and dealt with Kim’s bike dying on him. We’ve been to the Black Hills and been hailed on so heavily while hiking around Sylvan Lake that we had to take shelter in a deep crevice for a while.
We’ve visited his old friends in Minnesota
and my dear friend in Dallas (that would be Amy about a year before she learned she had cancer),
and we’ve been to the site of the Oklahoma City bombing as well as to the site of the 9/11 horrors in NYC. There are many more places we hope to visit, some in the U.S. and others abroad.
Kim and I complement one another. He supports me in all I do, and I can count on him. We’ve weathered some pretty bad things together and come out stronger. We’re coming up on 8 years of knowing one another. We don’t have an official anniversary date because our friendship simply slowly changed into something more, so we tend to go from that first poker run since that’s when we officially met.
So, happy birthday to my two besties, Silvia and Kim. Thank goodness you found me because my life is so much better with you in it.