What it means to be a best friend

After an interview here, an interview there, filling in for a couple of absent co-workers and finally getting a few hours to myself, my Best Friends Project is scheduled to run in Sunday's Lifestyles section.

Some people might say I'm a procrastinator. I'd say time knows no master.

Turns out talking to a lot of best friends at a lot of different ages is a lot of fun. These were some hilarious, bright women who have seen each other through surgeries, moves, divorces, children and all manner of bad hairstyles, bad boyfriends and bad luck.

At first, I set out to discover the chemistry of best friends, the psychological reason that women, when asked who their best friend is, immediately blurt out a name while many men say something like, "Well, uh ... I hang out with Carl some." Surely some 100-buck-an-hour shrink had the answer.

Turns out it isn't all that difficult.

Women just understand women the best. While men and women might share the same talents, goals and interests, we're speaking different languages. That's why one's husband may suddenly blurt out the words, "Do we have to be talking all the time?"

But that's another column.

It is a delicious privilege to share everything with another person who understands you. The adult women I talked to all said the same thing: A best friend is someone who is there for you no matter how bad it gets.

True, but I'll present an alternate theory.

You haven't put on your makeup ... for two days. Your child just let loose on the floor right by his training toilet. There's a sink full of dirty dishes. Your husband recently came home with an expensive new tool that he will use to destroy some piece of your house. The doorbell rings.

If you are happy to see the woman standing on the other side of that door, she is your best friend.

I've known Melissa since we were in sixth-grade science at Sikeston Middle School. There was a well-worn, highlighted romance novel being circulated around the room, and she was the one who finally passed it to me. Although my mother sat me down a year earlier for a long, confusing conversation about the birds and the bees, that romance novel really cleared things up for me.

The next year, we were together in a Duke University talent search where they administered the SAT to seventh-graders. She was the only person I told that I used the math portion of my bubble sheet to play solitaire tic-tac-toe. She lied and said she did badly too, but it turns out she skunked me in every subject.

In eighth grade, I passed her a note about our English teacher's hair and got kicked out of class. In ninth grade, we got the giggles over our home economics teacher's pronunciation of "succotash" and got kicked out of class.

I wrote her a long note over Christmas vacation that same year about having to deal with my parents and sisters -- how embarrassing they were -- and my mother found it hidden in my underwear drawer and grounded me for life or until graduation, whichever came first.

I probably owe Melissa my writing career, considering all those notes. She became an occupational therapist and certainly owes no debt of gratitude to me for that science-intensive field.

She saw me through a canceled wedding and the hyperventilation that followed. (Do NOT cancel a wedding once bride has already had the pumps dyed. That's more binding than the marriage itself.) I saw her through an on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again, on-again relationship that finally resulted in a great marriage and even better little boy.

I'd remind the ladies out there to appreciate their best friends and give them a call today, but that'd just be stupid.

You already know.

Heidi Hall is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.