Susie Again

I’ve heard the parents of twins describe how their babies, sharing a crib, will sometimes identify each other’s thumbs instead of their own and set to work sucking anyway. That’s how close they feel one to another and that’s how it’s been for my girl Annie and the friend she met at that 6th grade party: I speak of Susan, whose arduous initiation into motherhood I wrote about Monday.They were inseparable back then. Weekdays when she slept here, they would tackle that homework right away, eat an early supper, bathe or shower and  be tucked into Annie’s big bed up under the eaves by 9pm. I remember the morning Annie got down first to breakfast and reported that at one point during the night Susie, still sound asleep, had tried tucking a strand of Annie’s hair behind her own ear. (Easy mistake to make: you could let yourself down from a second-story window on Annie's hair back then.)Maybe I talked enough about their friendship the other day but what can I say? It isn’t often that such a large event takes place in the life of a person whose stuffed platypus has so often been through your washer and drier.Susie’s a natural athlete; every coach she has ever had has said as much. Annie, meanwhile, could care less about making the team. When, in sixth grade, she was pressed by her orthodontist to say what sport she most enjoyed playing she stunned him by quipping “I don’t do sports; I think sweating is  bad for you.” So too,  on her very first day of Archery as a freshman in high school she came home to say she’d gotten stuck inside the bow.They’re as different as day and night are Susan and Annie, and yet so close they consider themselves real sisters.I talked with Sooz yesterday in the hospital where she has been since Friday, rather a long stretch by today’s standards. She sounded a million miles away and calmer than the Buddha. I loved hearing her like this though it’s hard for me to picture her so still and quiet, knowing what she’s been like most times in our company, playing games and making everyone laugh, as see here below with our boy Michael  back in '98. That new baby she and Kevin just had, God bless him, is in for some very lively times.It isn’t  every day a baby is born to a person whose stuffed animals you’re on intimate terms with.)