Book 3 -- BEST FRIENDS & PROMISES

The very best of best friends are tried, true, and more important than we sometimes admit. With them, we share our highest highs and lowest lows. Without them, what might have been the best of times becomes something less than that. 

In the most fortunate of circumstances our best friend is also our life mate: a best friend, bound to us by deep love and matrimonial promises. The result is a powerful blend of similar, yet different forms of love, and the stuff of a life well lived. 

Yet for every great blessing there is a potential downside. What if we lose one or more of those "best friends"? Losing one can leave us disoriented and vulnerable. Losing both a spouse and a best friend risks an emotional meltdown.

As age and illness threaten to rob Aaron Peck of that companionship he is left to consider the emptiness and longing their leaving would create. His best friend, Johnny Blanton, is battling a balky heart. His wife, Leona, has retreated behind an impenetrable veil of dementia. In time she will no longer know who he is, or recall the promises he made to her so long ago. Though she cannot remember, Aaron cannot forget, even in the face of new, more comforting possibilities.

 Selected Excerpts from BEST FRIENDS & PROMISES

The two of them drove on in silence, absorbed in the shared wonder of how easy it was for old men like themselves to think such young thoughts. In one form or another, they had been thinking those thoughts for nearly sixty years, since junior high school. Though they had always been a team, in every way imaginable way they were different. Aaron was the quiet one: analytical, deliberate, and socially indifferent. Johnny Blanton, on the other hand, was the outgoing partner: everyone’s friend, quick with a quip, and possessed of a maddening tendency to act before he thought. There were times when it was hard to tell what Aaron was thinking. With Johnny there was never any doubt.

Their alliance had begun in the eighth grade. By high school they had been inseparable. During those adolescent years, Preston Fletcher had been their closest ally. Like them, he was a loner, with a rebellious streak rivaling Johnny’s. He and Johnny were alike in other ways. Beyond the ever present need to maintain their athletic eligibility, the academic elements of their education had seldom been a priority. They played sports, but preferred good times, something with an edge, like drinking beer and looking for girls who enjoyed similar pursuits. 

Now, wheeling down the interstate, considering the possibility of a “night on the town”, Aaron had to smile at the irony of it. There they were, seventy two years old, decades removed from those heady schoolboy days, yet still looking for “something with an edge”.

 ~~~

The signs were no longer new or surprising. For more than a year Aaron Peck had watched Leona struggle with her ill defined symptoms. At first he had passed them off as signs of normal aging. But in time they had multiplied and grown more persistent. The memory lapses increased in frequency and intensity. She repeated herself more often, sometimes eliciting half joking comments from friends and family. Well established activities, like organizing the daily routine of housekeeping, meals, and medications, had become increasingly random and haphazard. There were times she simply appeared to lose interest in such things.

Most days, in most ways, Leona carried on with a minimum of distraction. At church, among the ladies who knew and cared about her, her forgetful repeating was little more than a minor irritation. In the company of her own family, where love outweighed personal judgments, she was perfectly as ease. In that setting, surrounded by the girls and granddads, her robust laugh could still be heard. Yet, in spite of those recurring inconveniences, Aaron and Leona managed to stay on course, even during the trying moments when his own patience was tested. 

Sitting there on the steps, Aaron felt the quiet need to apologize once more to Leona for those detours taken with Johnny. Yet, in the next breath, he was silently thanking Johnny Blanton for the vibrant color he had brought to a sometimes bland and monochromatic life.