12 days of heather, day 2

i wrote this series remembering my best friend who was making pastries at windows on the world when she was senselessly killed by strangers with hate in their hearts. it’s been 18 years since i’ve seen her face, put my arms around her, eaten a meal she’s made. i wrote this to feel connected to her. i share it so that you might too.

day two
in our senior year, through a fortuitous accident of pre-computer age scheduling, many of us had a long break together on "f" days. (punahou to this day does letter days instead of days of the week.) for example, my break ran from something like 9am to 2pm. as the youngest child of two working parents, whose siblings were both away at college, heather basically had a three-bedroom apartment all to herself that was about a six-minute drive from school. i'm sure you can see where this is going....

the f day parties became legend. we had this amazing freedom and our own little world to shape during those times. sure, there was beer, but there was also a revolving cast of characters because heather's heart was so big and her door was always open. and yeah, we talked about bands and boys. but we also ranted about robespierre, thoreau and sartre--based on the heady topics of democracy, transcendentalism, and existentialism we were studying that year--in a way that only new minds fogged by olympia and budweiser can. it was the golden era of our youth, and not surprisingly, the most golden one among us was our host.