The Bucket List

Jay Jay and I go back – way back. I remember meeting her at age 6 when she walked into the small apartment I shared with my mom on 2nd Street in Anderson. She was with her Dad, who was there to pick us all up for our first “family” date. You see, my Mom and her Dad had been dating and this was the first time they felt it was OK to introduce the kids. Jay and I are only 7 months apart, so from that night and what turned out to be nearly nine years of marriage between our parents that followed, we were thought to be twins most places we visited. Mom would just smile and say, “No, they’re not twins. They’re seven months apart.” That would generate some funny and confused faces.

For two kids who weren’t too keen on sharing toys (or parents) at first, we’ve shared childhood Christmas memories, clothes (as all sisters do), a bedroom when she’d visit us every other weekend…We’ve fought over everything from who was washing vs. drying the dishes, who got to drink from the “Tweetie Bird” glass (likely a McDonald’s giveaway) at the dinner table and who got to use the phone in our dorm room more at Ball State to call our boyfriends back home (We’re old. We didn’t have cell phones). We’ve weathered family divorces, boyfriend break-ups, cancer scares and deaths of loved ones. We’ve experienced proud moments college graduation, our weddings and the birth of her two beautiful babies.

Our husbands (not the boyfriends mentioned earlier – ha ha) are also childhood friends who grew up in the same southwest Indy neighborhood and enjoy golf and fantasy baseball and football leagues more than we care to imagine! They’ll be waiting for us at the finish line May 2. We can already visualize them standing there, cheering us on. We get teary-eyed just thinking about it. To some, registering for this race is just something fun to do. For us, it’s about growing old as friends and sharing our experience for years to come…a check off the “Bucket List,” if you will. We’ll probably look back someday and ponder, “What the heck were we thinking!?”