My Buddy and Me

Let's just be out with it: I was very socially insecure as a kid. Not socially awkward, per say, but insecure. I never thought that my friends were the real deal.

Case in point: I walked to school with two girls from the neighborhood every day for three years. We played all the time after school and on the weekends.

Best buddies, right? For reasons real and imagined, I wasn't so sure. And so every once in a while on the way to school I'd simply stop walking...just to see how long it would take for them to notice. It always took way too long.

Marriage and adulthood---and a few amazingly loyal friends--have mostly cured me of my insecurities. But they still pop up from time to time--why does everyone else seem to have Shabbat plans but us? Maybe our shul friends don't really like us. Argh...

But then there's Chamudi.

Chamudi is the antidote. No matter where we go or what we do, Chamudi always looks out for me. "Meema?" he asks, if I fall too far behind Abba and him. "Meema!" He just wants me there with them...not for a snack and not for a toy...for me.

There's something about that looking back--so reminiscent of and yet so different from those failed childhood tests--that makes me, age 10 and age 31, finally feel secure.

Amazing...