My Friend Jennifer

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 12:46:31 -0700

I took a year off between high school and university and spent a few months of it living in Tours, France which is about an hour or two by train south of Paris. I can’t remember the specifics now for the life of me but some kind of problem happened with my host family resulting in my American roommate Jennifer and I, moving out suddenly. We had planned a trip to Les Eyzies for the end of that first month, with Uli and David. After stuffing our things into lockers at the train station, we took off in David’s car for a fascinating weekend discovering Cro Magnon man. It was absolutely brilliant to see the original cave paintings which are now closed to the public.
David continued on to Spain afterwards, while Jennifer and I returned to Tours by train. (I forget what happened to Uli but he may have only planned a month in France.) Upon arrival in Tours with nowhere to live, we decided to get a hotel room and look for a new home the next day. We spent the night back to back in a tiny bed, were interviewed by the the head of the Institute the next day and quickly got new homes. Jennifer had had enough of living with a host and chose a studio apartment while I ended up on the top floor of a town house with a large, boisterous family on rue Emile Zola.
Jennifer came to see me all the time while I only went to her studio once or twice. I suspect she enjoyed my family at a safe distance. She brought me copies of Playgirl which I flipped through in wonder. Many of the pages had holes in them - she had cut them out and sent them to her boyfriend in America! François Guillaume, the eldest son of my host family, told me he thought we were lesbians. I never did explicitly deny that, since I suspected this assumption offered me a layer of protection.
After three months of Chambord, Chenenceau and endless vineyards, not to mention French studies at L’Institut de Touraine, Jennifer returned to the States and I to England. It must have been a year or two later when she showed up in London and we met for lunch. More years had passed when I called a number in Iowa City that turned out to be her father’s dentist office. Soon, I was telling Jennifer over the phone about my plans to drive to San Francisco from the East Coast. She instantly informed me that I was staying with her in Pittsburgh, her parents in Iowa City and her sisters in Boulder. So I planned my trip accordingly!

Her mother called me in my California home a few years ago. Jennifer and her husband had died in a whitewater rafting accident in Colorado.
Best Friends
Jennifer would probably be amused to know that I have a picture of the two of us in my living room. We took a series of them in a photo booth in Pittsburgh and I framed an enlarged copy of my favorite one. Everything we did together was so natural, truthful, accepting and effortless that I had never stopped to label our friendship.
I miss the best friend I had in France. I now see the innocent purity with which we explored the world around us. I have come to value these qualities more than ever and I now appreciate how we were in a way that I couldn’t have done as a teenager. At the time I couldn’t help but take these things a little bit for granted.
In Pittsburgh, she teased me about sounding Americanized. Apparently I was using all the phrases that used to be quotations in my “Why do Americans say ... ?” sentences. I think if she were to read this, she would point to the fact that I’ve referred to my boarding school as a “high school” which, to be honest, still feels strange.