Jesus, and other Unexpected Friends

It was all she could do to control her breathing. Images of an impending doom flashed across her mind like a 1960’s nuclear film, and she wrestled to stay in control.

This was my mom dropping me off for my first day at boarding school.

Anyone who has met my mom knows that she is completely groovy. She is the ‘cool’ mom. One hundred percent real and always ready with an encouraging word or practical joke.

That being said, she is still a mom and is always ready to protect her kids. It was this maternal attribute that she was trying to rein in when she strolled around the corner and walked into my dorm room.

My roommate had already moved in and was in the process of decorating. War photos ripped from the pages of Time lined the walls. A confederate flag was draped over the window, and cast an eerie shade of red over the monochromatic stills of embattled soldiers and trench warfare. Heavy metal music played softly in the background.

I thought it was ridiculously cool. If my roomie didn’t disembowel me before my first REM cycle that night, I knew we’d be fast friends.

The coming year would bring a lot of changes to the landscape of my life. First French kiss. Lost my nerd status. Parents got a divorce. Did my own laundry. Hitchhiked to a nearby city for a crazy weekend that almost got me kicked out of school.

Grade eleven. Good times.

Oh, and I got the Shanghai Flu. Nasty little bug. I don’t remember much about it, so I won’t embellish, but I want to tell you more about my roommate. I was lying in bed sick when he came back to the room after school. I did not want to talk. I did not want to move. So I pretended to be asleep. Maybe he’d just leave and go to the dining hall or something.

He did leave.

Then he came back two minutes later, and with me still pretending to sleep he took a cool damp cloth and gently wiped my feverish forehead.

What kind of self-respecting adolescent tough guy does a thing like that?

Answer: the best kind.

He and I are still friends, as are our wives. I go to church a bit more than he does. He has more tattoos than I do. You could say that the Christian establishment has left a bad aftertaste in his mouth.

But I have hope for him, because when I was a sick, scrawny kid he reminded me of Jesus: often showing up with love and true friendship in dark, unexpected places.