Twenty-five years and still giggling

My best friend Heather is officially addicted to Woody’s cheeseburgers. While five-months pregnant in the heat of the summer, there is nothing like finding a little comfort in a five pound burger and a pile of fries.

Heather drove down from Grenada last week just to eat the famous Woody’s cheeseburger. “I actually dreamed about it,” she told me.
Of course, I want to believe she came to see me, but I suspect the cheeseburger was the draw.

Heather is my oldest friend. We met the first day of fourth grade, and have been best friends through elementary, high school, and college. Since she got married ten years ago, she has lived more than an hour from me, but we have remained as close as ever. Of course, the phone bills have run rampant.

After she and her husband moved to Tupelo following their marriage and I was still in Oxford completing my last semester, we would talk on the phone from the moment I got home from class at about 10 a.m. until her husband came home from work at 5 p.m. We would watch television together on the phone. At the end of the month, her husband got the phone bill and our days of Jerry Springer and Oprah were over.

Growing up, Heather was always getting me into trouble. Just to clarify, when I say trouble, I don’t mean held-over-to-the-grand-jury-type of trouble – stupid kid stuff that gets you beat by your parents.

For example, she almost got me kicked out of fourth grade. She made me laugh during the sixth grade graduation, and of course, I made a spectacle of myself. They stopped the program until I shut up, and later I got yelled at in front of the entire class and threatened with expulsion. My teacher called my parents, and I got an “unsatisfactory” in conduct on my report card.

That following summer, we were nearly sent home from church camp after she talked me into skipping chapel (of course, that might have been my idea). As we hid under a weeping willow tree, Heather kicked what appeared to be an empty beer car at me. It wasn’t empty – it exploded all over both of us. We ended up in the dining hall later smelling like we had been on a two-week drunk.

There are very few memories I have that do not involve Heather. High school and college are a blur of yard rolling, coffee and pie from The Beacon, Rebel football games, midnight trips to Huddle House in New Albany for waffles, red hair dye she promised would wash out after three shampoos (uh, no!), and a late night Voodoo tour in New Orleans that gave us nightmares for weeks.

After 10 years, we now live just 20 miles from each other. We know there will be many more memories to make – some good, some bad. For the record, the bad ones will totally be Heather’s fault.