Friendship Survives a Nice Little Rout

The great thing about friendship in middle age is how immune we become to the little slights that would have ignited a 10-year grudge match in our youth.

Self-interest drives this evolving largesse. The longer we live, the more we stumble into potholes of our own creation. We've had to rely enough times on the forgiveness of others that it behooves us to shorten our own list of indictable offenses.

Well into my 30s, for example, I could stew for months over the slightest personal criticism. Touchy, touchy. Now, as long as you aren't running off with my husband or threatening my children, we're at peace you and I.

Really. Those days of sticking pins in voodoo dolls? Died with disco.

Ignoring a friend in public? Totally an issue of forgetting to reorder contacts.

And never, ever, would I devote an entire column to a friend's betrayal.

Well, almost never.

So this was the plan: Out of the goodness of our Cleveland Indians-loving hearts, my husband and I would take our friend Emily to Game 6 of the American League Championship Series.

In Boston.

Because that's where Emily lives, and it was her birthday.

Because John, her husband and our beloved friend, had died almost a year ago, and we knew that he, a lifelong Indians fan, would have wanted us to be together on the night we clinched the pennant.

Because the two of us were certain that all three of us would practically itch from the warm fuzzies of camaraderie that creep up on your body like cladosporium whenever two or more people unite against a common foe and boldly charge into enemy territory.

This tapestry of magical thinking began to unravel right about the moment we saw what Emily was wearing.

Jeans? Check .

Sandals? Check .

Dark blue shirt? Check .

Wait a minute.

What was that on her shirt?

My husband and I looked more closely.

We stepped back, looked at each other.

"No," he said, softly.

We leaned in, looked a little more closely.

"No!" he said again, only this time not at all softly.

There it was, a single letter of Old English font poised ever so delicately just right of center on Emily's shirt:

B .

"Emily," I said.

"Yeah, Emily ," he said.

Emily smiled.

"It's small," she said, tugging on her shirt to illustrate her not-even-close-to-valid point. "Subtle."

Clearly, she was unmoved by our hurt feelings, our wounded pride.

We went straight for guilt.

"What would John say?" I said.

"Yeah. John ."

She laughed. "John? Oh, John would have wanted me to be my own person. He always loved me for that."

Oh, brother, that's right; he was one of those husbands.

Fine, we decided. Our years of friendship could trump a little team loyalty. We would walk through Gate A and straight into the time of our lives with our pal Emily, who was going to need all the compassion we could muster for her and her sorry boys of summer, anyway, by the bottom of the ninth.

Or not.

I think it happened right after J.D. Drew's grand slam in the first inning. Or maybe it was after the Red Sox scored six more runs in the third. I don't know. All I remember is that, at some point, it was all too clear that only one of us was having the time of her life, and it wasn't either of Emily's friends from Cleveland.

"Why does she keep clapping like that?" my husband whispered.

"She's happy," I said, bumping up against her maybe a tad too hard.

"Oops, sorry," she said, laughing.

Then she looked at us. "Really, I am sorry." Then she stood up and started hollering like her hair was on fire.

Final score: Emily won.

I'm so glad our friendship is steeped in middle age. No grudges here, no axes to grind. We hugged Emily — good ol' gloating, victorious Emily. We kiss-kissed her cheeks, gave them a good little pinch, too, and promised we'd call.

Someday.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.