A Kernel of Corn ~ The Beginning

This is one of those times when I wish I were a writer. I've been sitting here for hours trying to write about my best friend/college roommate but I'm frustrated because I just can't seem to put the right words together to express how much I admire her, or to illustrate her beauty, courage and spirit. Nevertheless, over the next few days, I am going to write about my friend Nicole.

We were nineteen when we met, the first day of our sophomore year in college. Nicole and I had a lot in common and we became fast friends. We shared a townhouse during our junior and senior years. Those three college years with Nic were full of Lucy and Ethel adventures and misadventures and I loved every fun, crazy minute.

Nicole was tall and beautiful and would turn heads when she entered a room. She was also one of the nicest people I have ever met. In the entire time I knew her, I never once heard her say anything nasty about anyone. But she wasn’t nice in that overly sweet, annoying way. She was just confident and easygoing. Nicole was religious, but not judgmental. She lived her life the way she needed to but accepted people as they were. Nicole would get up every Sunday morning and go to church, no matter how late we had stayed out the night before. I always thought it was funny because Nicole went to church on her own volition. I slept in every Sunday because my parents weren’t around to make me get up and go to church.

Nic wasn’t perfect. We had the largest collection of stolen bar glasses in town. I can’t remember ever leaving an establishment without hearing the sound of clinking glasses in Nicole’s purse. She (with three unnamed accomplices) once left a banquet with two complete place settings stashed away. It was a dinner for the football team; very festive and pretty. And yes, everything was lifted before dinner; Nic wasn’t about to ruin a good purse. Plus, our boyfriends at the time drew the line at sneaking out dirty dishes for us.

Nic had a stalker during our senior year. He eventually stole a load of MY clothes out of the dryer and nailed a pair of MY panties to our door with an obscene note to Nicole. It didn’t take long to figure out it was the weird neighbor who came over to introduce himself wearing nothing but his Speedo's in 30 degree weather. We heard his parents spent all night packing his stuff up so he could be gone by the next morning. I teased Nic for years about how she owed me new towels and underwear because of her bad choice in stalkers.

Being best friends, Nicole and I talked about everything. While we were alike in a lot of ways, we didn’t share the same hopes and dreams. I wanted a career with no concrete plans, no boundaries, no fences. Marriage before age thirty wasn’t an option for me. Nicole, on the other hand, had her life mapped out. According to her master plan, she would graduate, get married, work for a year, have her first child, then spend the next twenty years being a wife and mother. There was never any doubt in her mind that this would happen, in that order, and according to her schedule.