picture in a frame

There is only one best friend I've had for as long as I've been nearly grown. Her name is Rebekah. She has come to see me, she is here in Africa, and right now she is in the shower. I just heard her cough, in that echoey way coughs sound when you're standing in a bathroom.

It is my belief that there are people who are about stories, The Stories, and people who are about answers. My friend Dan mentioned this to me in passing, once when we were chatting about why I did not see myself falling in love with a particular person (unnamed). That idea, of Story-people and Answer-people, latched itself onto my brain. It has changed everything about how I understand people and the world.

Rebekah is about Stories. She always has been, which is why we are together at this moment, on the same side of the world, picking up the fragmented bits of our lives and piecing them back together again. The edges always come together eventually, no matter how much time has passed or what boyfriends have hurt us or what fads and philosophies have changed us or what jobs have flung us out to antipodes. It takes time sometimes, but "when it is darkest, you can see the stars", Ralph Waldo Emerson said. We always see the stars in each other; that is why we are friends who are best.

Some people look like Story-people, but actually are Answer-people; and sometimes Story-people come off as Answer-people (but they aren't). It's not always obvious who is which. I love thinking about that.

Rebekah's dad, Bob, for example, is somebody most people would classify as an Answer-man. They look at him - a car mechanic, has been his whole life - and they think to themselves: Here is a guy who’s about the facts, who figures things out, can fix things, someone who what you see is what you get. He knows about a lot of things: Ice-fishing. Minnesota forests. How to tie a canoe up onto a car. He can identify passing airplanes from miles away. He’s a quiet guy, innately curious about the world, and kind. 

Once, when I was in my senior year of high school and Rebekah and I had already been joined at the hip for a couple years, I was at their house and wanted to ask him something, but I wasn't sure how to refer to him. I'd always used the old-fashioned Mr. V---- form but it had begun to feel unnaturally formal to me, I think because my own parents insisted my friends call them by their first names. So I asked Rebekah, in a low whisper, if I could call her dad Bob.

Then she did one of the most annoying things on the planet, which is to take something meant to be discreet and broadcast it to everyone. "HEY DAD!" she yelled across the house to where he was standing on the back porch, grilling trout. "CAN BROOKE CALL YOU BOB?"

I'm grateful that our friendship survived that little episode, but at the time there was evil in my heart of which I cannot speak. Clearly taken aback, his answer was a simple no.

It took another couple of years before I felt secure enough to broach this topic with him, again. It was one of those beautiful summer evenings; I had been overseas for a long time and just returned, my head still fuzzy with foreign places and people; and he and I were sitting together at a picnic table, beside a lazy northern river disorderly with swooping, mating dragonflies. He was teaching me how to clean fish. There were about four dozen of them, dead, iridescent, fragrant with that clean nature smell, splayed out across the wooden tabletop before us.

He chuckled as I recalled the incident from those years ago. He said he'd just been being stupid, sort of old-fashioned, and that he really didn't care at all what I called him, especially now that I was at university. It was a relief to know. (Another few years passed before I actually felt prepared to initiate this name change, but I joked with him about it a lot in the meantime. It’s only been very recently that I call him Bob with any regularity. For a lot of years, I just didn't call him anything at all.)

Once we'd resolved that issue there by the river, he and I continued to sit together, both wielding our paring knives, grabbing at fish, their bloody guts lathered over our hands, fish scales drying and sticking to our arm hairs. Then without looking up, filleting as he spoke, Mr. V began reminiscing outloud to me about the first time he drove Rebekah to my house, for what would have been our first time ever of hanging out together outside of school. I still remember that day too. We were 15 years old.

He told me that he and his wife Ahna Kristi had been praying for a long time for Rebekah to have a close friend. Then, that day, after she stepped out of their boxy, gray Chevy Caprice and walked in the front door of our suburban brick rambler, he confessed that he'd simply sat unnoticed in the driveway for a few minutes, watching through the bay window as she and I bounded over to the couch, plopped down together, nearly in each other's laps, giggling (I suppose), our faces alight with the pleasure of each other and of secrets. What he’d also seen, though invisible to the eye, was the everyday holiness of two hearts who, having groped for a long while in the darkness, finally find and clasp hands together, kindreds. He'd sat there in the driveway watching us, seeing our young hearts, smiling softly, and then he'd known that they didn’t need to pray for her to find a friend anymore. 

So you see, my point is that many people, when meeting Bob, would probably put him down as an Answer-person, what with his profession and his straightforward manner. But they would be wrong. He's really a Story-person. Because I believe that what Bob really loves, in the end, is the poetry of life.

(Jesus was a story person too. I am definitely not saying that makes Story-people better; but... that's just the truth of it. The incarnate offspring of God, when he was doing life, was interested in Stories, rather than logic or expediency or everything being just so.)

Everybody displays both qualities sometimes. But my theory is that you can only be one or the other at your core.

I am a Story-person. Rebekah is. But thank God there are solid Answer-folks too to keep things moving round here. I tend to surround myself with story-people, feel drawn to them. But the more days I accumulate on Earth, I see how this is not wise and that I am often stymied by doing so.

Life is not romantic-comedy, is the crushing truth of the matter; it is violent, vulgar, explicit; too often "not appropriate for children". There is so much aching loveliness around (cuddling beneath a feather blanket; the moment you realize it's okay to get divorced, or drop out of grad school, or fail in a big way; the way the earth smells in autumn); but it is also full of pain, with an ugliness that torments and slays us (sex abuse, racism, loneliness). It seems to me that simply living requires an inordinate amount of courage no matter which category of people you fall into. But for the very truest of Story-people, sometimes the tragedies cut too deep. Our hearts fail within us.

I need Answer-people to keep me making pancakes each morning, to remind me I must soldier on, that life is about fixing the toilet, submitting the evaluation report, and buying fertilizer, too. Things that are so basic, they are profound.

Now Rebekah is perched in our electrically-azul veranda, in a matching electrically-azul tank-top and plugging away at Portuguese while I pause in my writing to explain pronunciation or grammar to her. Tia Liliana is beside her, in our gross old recliner, curled up into an impossibly small ball, resting after Rebekah gifted her with a world-class pedicure. Joseph is here too, spread out, face-down, napping in the study though it is only mid-morning, insensible with the deep exhaustion of grief. His mother died, unexpectedly, last Thursday and he returned from the funeral in Zim only late last night. Sara is away teaching nearly-illiterate Mozambicans how to do preschool.

We are a house full of hurting and death, laughing and living, crickets and turmeric, dirty dishes, melting chocolate, Stories, one plugged toilet, the smell of dried fish, and Answers - though, of those... not many.