There are friends who are more than friends, more than best friends even, they are kindred spirits. To an outsider, you may seem like two very different types of people-good friends-but very different. What they don't understand though, is that your spirits are actually made of the same stuff and this explains everything. This explains how unlike other friends, you two don't "grow apart" as you get older. You don't "lose touch" when one of you moves hundreds of miles away. You grow closer. I have a small handful of them. They are few, they are rare, they are instant and they are eternal.
I met my very first when I was around nine years old.
(She's the blond, not the baby).
Sarah Horst and I met at a weekday Bible study that our mom's went to. Both of us being homeschooled, we found ourselves together in the kid's building every Thursday morning. We lived blocks from each other for about two years. Then I moved and we've lived a thousand miles from each other for the past fifteen.Sarah and I wrote each other religiously, emphatically and sincerely for years. I started writing her a letter on our way out of town, the pink ink spiraling across the pages as our car wound it's way down the California Grape Vine. I think she had actually mailed one to me before I had finished writing, and she never stopped. I would visit Southern California every year for weeks and towards the end of high school she began driving up to visit me.
During one of my winter visits I was staying with my dad who had recently bought-well, probably not bought in the typical sense of the word, but we'll say "came across"-an old VW Bug. In hind sight, I'm thinking it was very possible that someone may have actually paid him to take it. It was white-ish, blue-ish and gray-ish. The tired colors faded in and out all around the dome shaped body. The paint wasn't the only "issue" the car had. It had some trouble starting, and once you got it running, you had to work at keeping it running. It also had some "ghost" problems that came and went. We would soon discover some of these.
Shortly after Sarah came over, which was just about the instant I did, we decided to take the bug on a joy ride. My dad got it started for us then gave me his cell phone along with some pointers on how to keep it running, start it again should it die, stop, go, turn, etc. At first Sarah didn't want to buckle up. She wanted to be able to bail out at any time apparently.
"Buckle up!" I told her. I was driving and I didn't want to get a ticket should we get pulled over. She informed me that if we got pulled over, that would be the last ticket an officer was going to write-plenty of other things to cite. She was right.
It was dark when we took off on our adventure, which made it all the more exciting. We tore around the surface streets of the foothills, not really ever stopping at the stop signs-not just because we were in California, but because I was afraid of "killing it" and then having to try to start it again. We drove around with lots of yelling and screaming, some legit, some from the adrenaline rush and some just for affect. We arrived at Sarah's cousin's house and parked the car. We decided it would be okay to turn the car off since her cousin and his friends could surely help us start it again. Um, no one was home.
We were on our own. I opened the driver's side door, reached in and placed one hand on the steering wheel holding the door open with my other hand. Sarah put her hands on the back of the car and leaned into it with all 95 lbs of her body. We both screamed and ran until the car was moving. Once it picked up a little momentum, I jumped in, pumped the gas, held in the clutch and turned the key. After a minute or so, it backfired, spat out some smoke and roared to life. I tried to slow down a little as Sarah was chasing behind me down the street, but knew I shouldn't stop.
"Get in!" I screamed. Sarah, leaving her flip flops behind, sprinted to catch up and after I circled the block a couple of times, she managed to get into the moving vehicle. I was impressed.
We headed back towards my dad's house honking for people to get out of the way, laughing hysterical, nervous laughter and trying not to swear. We were pretty close to home when I found myself caught between a rock and a hard place. I came to a stop sign on a hill that I had to stop at. We needed to turn left on a very busy main drag. I had to keep the car running while at a complete stop, keep the car from rolling backwards into the car behind us, which was of course, a police car, and watch the traffic so as not to miss my opening. I sat there with the clutch all the way in, the brake all the way in and I had to ask Sarah to loan me her bare, left foot so she could continue to give the car a little gas to keep it from dying. I really don't know how we pulled it off-the successful, accident free left turn and the not getting pulled over-it was a miracle.
I'm not sure if we did things like this because we were kindred spirits or if doing things like this molded us into kindred spirits, but there is enough of these kinds of stories I suppose to serve as evidence for either scenario.
What about you? Who are the kindred spirits in your life?
