there you are, peter

when you are young you don't always know when you meet people who will be important to you. you are meeting new people all the time, and so many people and friends float in and out of your life that realizing who's important sometimes takes time.
and then, after a while, once something happens- you realize it. a life transition, a death, a move, a heart break. there might be a number of times in your life when you realize just how lucky you are to know the people you know. but what is important is that you do realize it.

when i was in college i was struck with this crazy feeling one day. i had had one of the most amazing best friends my senior year of high school. and i had totally taken him for granted.
obviously, i didn't do that on purpose. it's just that i found after being in college for a little while that nobody was quite like jared. he is funny and smart and understated. confident and thoughtful. he picked me up for school every morning of senior year and often drove me home. he gave me his opinion when it counted, and didn't judge me (too harshly) when i was a crazy adolescent. he gave me one of my favorite nicknames, which he's still the only one to use.

i visited him this weekend. he's a doctor now. real fancy. he just had his 'golden birthday'- he turned 29 on the 29th. and a month ago when we were catching up and commiserating on loneliness and life's odd turns- i found cheap tickets to go see him.

now, jared and i don't see each other very often anymore. we're the type of close friends who catch up on the phone every once in a while and it's like one long conversation. we don't have to worry about if the other has changed or if time will make things weird. it's not weird. i already know he's a phone talker who is prone to silences which some might find awkward. i fill them with random stories and questions. but when i get to SEE jared, the silences are never awkward at all. in fact, i'm reminded even more about all the things i love about him:

~we like a lot of the same movies, and he lets me give detailed synopses to get him up to speed on things.
~he gives really good hugs. he kind of plants his feet and really squeezes back in a way that let's you know you are not the only participant in the hug.
~he often knows what i am trying to say as i open my mouth to say it
~he pokes fun at me, but always at appropriate times and never too harshly
~when he's telling me about people in his life he is detailed, and he always tells me what he thinks i will like about them. which makes me feel like he has thought about it and keeps me involved in his life even when i'm not there.
~he is the only other person i know who not only owns Hook on VHS, but quotes it as frequently as i do.
~we share a love of the mighty ducks (especially D2) that no one can equal. ducks fly together.
~he remembers a lot of my embarrassing high school moments, and shares them in a way that makes me know they are part of the reason he liked being my friend back then.
~we have a song or two (oooor 4?) that are 'our songs'. and when he karaoked one with someone else last year he called me to tell me he'd "cheated" on me. but it was with a girl he had a huge crush on so it was a worthy cause.
~he has this laugh that is just great. it seems to grow as he realizes why he finds something funny.
~sometimes when we discover we like the same thing (ex: recently it's the movie "Drive", starring my bf ryan gosling) we like the same things about it (such as...the opening credits involving pink 80s writing and an awesome song we listened to on repeat all weekend)
~he really appreciates a good titular line (which is, of course, when the title of a movie is mentioned in the dialogue somewhere) as well as good tag lines. a summer of working at blockbuster will do that to you.
~it's always reassuring to know that someone knew you back then, and still really knows you now. so you haven't really changed all that much.
~and finally, we used to drive around at night and park his car in a parking lot or in front of my house and lay the seats back and stare out the windows and have long talks about "life" and how we wanted ours to end up. and jared always had these insightful things to say. it's still kind of like that. with a few Hook references thrown in, of course.