There was once a friend I had who was incredible. Remarkable. Exciting. Too splendid for any adjective in the English language.
She is still my friend. But she no longer fits any description above. What she is now is what most of us are — ordinary. Normal. And, too often, downright ho-hum.
But once? Once, she was an adventuress who lived out experiences — often exotic and tantalizing — then returned to her native South to recite the story in the most beautiful language. Spellbound, I and other friends listened to her tales and I, for one, tried to tattoo into my brain some of the gorgeous phrases that dripped alluringly from her tongue.
A female Hemingway is what she was. On a moment’s notice, she dashed off to Africa to see giraffes and elephants wandering, unrestrained. Once, she spent an entire summer in Paris, pretending she belonged not to the South but to the poets and writers who littered the Left Bank.
“Would you like to have dinner on Wednesday?” I asked once on the phone.
“No, no,” she replied absentmindedly as I heard her flipping through her mail. “I’m leaving Tuesday for Brazil. A quail hunt.”
As my rare fortune would have it, I had recently read an article about hunting being illegal in Brazil.
“If you’re goin’ huntin’ in Brazil, I hope you’ve found a good attorney to rescue you from dreary prison life,” I replied.
At that moment, I knew, she stopped looking at her mail. “Why, on earth, would you say such a thing?”
“Brazil doesn’t allow hunting. I’ll send you the news story.”
Unfazed, she shrugged it off. “Then, we’ll hop over to Venezuela or visit a rain forest.” She yawned slightly. “Though that wouldn’t be tremendous fun because I’ve already seen a rain forest.”
She was sophisticated in a way that, admittedly, I admired. She read books that were slim volumes of poetry and used intellectual parlance. Once, she had come to spend the weekend with me, having no grander place to visit — though she did admit that seeing a place called Blood Mountain where, once, two tribes had warred against each other to the point that blood coursed down the mountain and trickled across the Appalachian Trail, was as almost as fetching as the Denali had been — and this I will remember always: I went to bed after midnight but she stayed up to read Dante.
Around 4 in the morning, I slipped out of bed for a glass of water and from the darkened kitchen, I could see her on the sofa, still reading by a soft-lighted lamp, completely absorbed.
Delight is what she almost always brought to me because her stories were engaging and the freedom of her life — provided by a trust fund that was mostly funded by Coca-Cola stock purchased in the 1930s — was awe-inspiring. In those days, the most I could hope for was a week’s stay in Daytona Beach or, using frequent flier miles and money scrimped together for years, a week in Ireland.
Then, it happened. The day I learned that I would no longer live vicariously through her carefree journeys, my heart broke. It was the end of a happy era.
While in Washington, D.C., where she was visiting a friend who was an ambassador or someone of an equally grand title, she met a charming man and, in her typically impulsive way, eloped within days.
Quickly, his charm evaporated and several years later, after five shots of Scotch — the only woman I’ve ever known to drink hard liquor — she admitted what a grievous folly it had been.
Her flowery language had wilted and her carefree ways — children can be a damper on free-spirited folks — had melted away like ice cream in the Monte Carlo summer.
I’m not sure who regrets it more — she or I.
Ronda Rich is the best-selling author of “St. Simons Island: A Stella Bankwell Mystery.” Visit www.rondarich.com to sign up for her free weekly newsletter.