The Good, Hard Lessons

They say that everyone who comes into your life is there for a reason. If that’s true, there must have been a million reasons I needed to know Maureen (Reen the Bean, Reenie). I became conscious of her presence in my life around age 3 or 4, although she’d been there before that. We were next door neighbors in Omaha, Nebraska, and we would spend the next 60+ years moving in and out of each other’s lives. Through each phase of our friendship—even the times we drifted apart—Maureen and I learned together, and taught each other, crucial lessons about life, love, and enduring friendship.

My 8th birthday, kneeling, Maureen far right.

1. Communication. In one of my earliest memories of Maureen, whoever finished dinner first would go out on their front porch and give a loud a mourning dove call: oo-OO-oo! That meant you were done eating and ready to play again. Back then, in our neighborhood full of young families, you played outside except in the most brutal winter weather. Some of us went to school, we preschoolers played all day or had half-day kindergarten, then we all ate dinner with our families as fast as we could and got right back out there until the streetlights came on. I still sometimes do my mourning dove call in the back yard after dinner when no one’s around. 

2. Construction (and Vengeance). A mean woman named Lillian lived on the other side of Maureen. She yelled at us to stay out of her yard, and she wouldn’t let us play on her very nice swing set. So in an empty lot behind Lillian’s house, Maureen and I built an elaborate, multi-story, low-rent public housing complex for our Troll dolls. We used cinderblocks, bricks, rocks, dirt piles, trash, and anything we could drag over. We made matchbox & Kleenex beds, fabric scrap carpeting, and stick & Elmer’s glue furniture. Poor Lillian could only sit at her kitchen window, watching us and wringing her hands. And I won’t tell you about the time a team of resourceful small people made a secret formula of Clorox, Wishbone Italian salad dressing, and dish soap, and poured it on Lillian’s new rose bushes, meant to be a barrier between her yard and Maureen's. Hell hath no fury like spurned first-graders.

3. Sharing. Debbie Lechner lived behind us on the next street over. I remember her as the sweetest kid in the neighborhood. One time, I grabbed Debbie’s tennis shoes, ran home and put them in the milkbox on our porch (those were the days we still got daily milk deliveries from the “milkman”), and sat on the milkbox. She cried, but I was unrelenting. Her crime? She wanted to play with us, and I wanted Maureen all to myself. But Maureen patiently and kindly negotiated a truce, I gave up the shoes, and from then on, Debbie was often part of our band of renegades.

4. Fashion. When we were 12 or 13, back in the days when it was safe to do this, Maureen and I took the bus downtown to Brandeis department store. Brandeis had four stories, a soda fountain, a photo booth, escalators, and an elevator. We could have root beer floats, buy PEZ (my favorite back in those hippie days was “Flower Power” PEZ which tasted, maybe a little too much, like flowers), and ride the elevator up and down till we got kicked off. But on this occasion, we were on a mission: to buy our first bras (which neither of us needed). We had both worn white shirts—so the straps would show through, of course—and hit the photo booth for our “model” shots.

Our sophisticated, bra-wearing model shot.

Another photo booth glam shot.

5. Travel. When we were 18, Maureen and I each bought a Greyhound Bus “Ameripass.” For $99 back then, you could travel on Greyhound on any of their routes in the contiguous U.S. for two weeks, getting on and off anywhere, any time, as many times as you wanted. So we went from Omaha, to Lincoln, to Denver, to Los Angeles, to San Fransisco, and on up the coast to Vancouver BC, then back home. We often slept on the bus by night (so we wouldn’t have to pay for motels) and toured different cities by day. We stopped in Lincoln to attend the Burt Hall banquet with friends at Nebraska Wesleyan. I had my Ovation guitar along, and we sometimes sang for our supper (usually grilled cheese or pie). We went to Huntington Beach. At Disneyland, we made 8 mm movies—I still have those reels somewhere, and interestingly, they’re all shots of cute guys, not us or the park. We got a motel room once or twice so we could shower. We sat on the library steps at UC Berkeley, where a young man told us, “I dreamed you last night.” We cooked dinner in San Fran for a friend’s brother—spaghetti…always spaghetti.

Greyhound depot, a bit too early.

Dressing up for the Burt Hall Banquet.

We're all Bozos on this bus.

Denver

Meetup in Denver with Maureen's dad.

The ocean at last - Huntington Beach.

Welcome to the hotel California.

Long overdue showers.

6. Real (Almost) Adulthood. When we got back from our epic bus trip, Maureen and I rented a house together in Lincoln (except for family and husbands, Maureen is the only roommate I’ve ever had). I enrolled at Nebraska Wesleyan (with a full-ride scholarship I would forfeit for dropping out less than a year later—it was the 70s…I was distracted), and Maureen enrolled at UNL. We had a tiny, cheap, one-bedroom house at the end of a street that dead-ended at a cemetery. I had seven cats to take care of (our mama cat, which I’m sure we couldn’t afford to properly vet, had five kittens). Maureen, the cats, and I all shared the house’s only bed. We both had jobs in addition to school. We paid the bills. We bought groceries. We did laundry. We had friends over for dinner. I remember our diet consisted mainly of spaghetti with butter and salt (pre-Ramen days), Wonder Bread, and Grape Nuts. We mowed our lawn.

The Tucker Hotel

The Tucker Hotel

Our little house in Lincoln.

7. Religion. My friendship with Maureen sparked what would become my lifelong interest in (obsession with) religion and spirituality. I was the one kid in our family who went to Florence Presbyterian church with my grandma, with whom we lived off and on in the North Omaha historic “Tucker Hotel,” a 17-room house and former hotel that had been in my mom’s family since the 1800s. I sang in the choir and was confirmed. I went to Bible camp in the summer. Maureen’s family was Irish and Catholic, so she went to St. Philip Neri, half a block from the Presbyterian church. On many Sundays, I went to mass with Maureen, then she went to the Presbyterian service with me. In the Catholic church, I genuflected, blessed myself with holy water, and knew all the call & response passages. I adored the ritual. I made Maureen go to confession when she picked a flower in Forest Lawn cemetery with its “DO NOT PICK THE FLOWERS” signs. I even took communion until a horrified Father Meyer discovered I wasn’t Catholic.

8. The Village. Maureen’s mother (who I remember only as a blurry sort of gorgeous “movie star” presence) died when we were quite young, leaving Maureen and her 8 siblings to be raised by her dad, a wonderful, warm, larger-than-life man who worked for Union Pacific railroad. We learned almost from birth that the Village raised children: my mom and Maureen’s older sisters all mothered us both. We had dance parties to “Spooky” on the hi-fi or Shindig on the TV in her living room, with her dad as our audience. My grandma was constantly feeding and washing neighborhood children. All the adults kept track of us.

9. Tolerance and Forgiveness. When we were 19 and living in Lincoln, I took up with a folksinger, as one often did back then, and went with him and his folk duo partner on a three-week road trip to New Mexico. While I was gone, Maureen met a young Iranian man who invited her to dinner, then convinced her to join the Unification Church (called the “Moonies” back then after their founder, Rev. Sun Myung Moon), and she left for New York, where the church was headquartered. She let local church members pick through the house and take what they wanted—these were considered “donations” to the church—and she left the house untended. She eventually called my mother from the road (this was pre-cell-phone days, so she couldn’t get in touch with me). She told Mom that she had gone. My mom had to borrow a truck and go clear out what was left in the house. The cats, left in the house, had by then torn open a screen and disappeared.

I ended up marrying the folksinger and moving back to Omaha and the Tucker Hotel. We eventually had a son and a daughter. I didn’t hear from Maureen for several years, although I learned she had been one of 4,000 people married by Rev. Moon in Madison Square Garden. She married a French man she hadn’t known before the wedding. They eventually had three daughters.

I’ll admit I was pretty angry with Maureen for a good long while after she left—I had lost some things very dear to me in Maureen’s church “donations” and the untended house, like my cats (my male cat, Gandalf, was an Abyssinian and a gift from my then boyfriend, Dave), my grandmother’s antique wool carpet, china handed down to me by a great aunt, houseplants my grandmother had been growing for years and gave me when I moved into the house, including a 30-year-old crown of thorns I had named Barney.

But once the anger softened, I missed Maureen. Seeing her again and knowing she was okay became more important than my stuff. Maureen stopped by to visit when she finally came back to town for the first time since joining the church. We muddled our way through that first rocky reunion. We weren’t back on great footing, but it was a start. A few years later, she was back in Omaha visiting family again, and she drove up to South Dakota, where I was living by then with my new husband, my two little kids, and our new son. She brought her three adorable girls, toddlers then, and we had a happy, sweet visit. We were slowly finding our way through. 

Maureen and her beautiful daughters, Ivy the dog.

We met up a few times after that, whenever she was back in Omaha. I’d drive down from SoDak, and we’d meet up for coffee or lunch, or we’d visit each other’s families. By our last visit in 2022, seeing her was joyful, natural, and light again, with lots of laughs, hugs, goofing around, and wonderful conversations about spirituality, our shared history, and family.

Maureen and her sister Margaret.

10. Life & Death. In another of my earliest memories, we were maybe five or six, I was playing by myself in our basement, twirling around a support pole. I remember the feel of the pole in my hands. My dad came downstairs and told me that Maureen had been riding her bike down King St. (our two houses were at the very top of steep King St. hill) and had been hit by a car. She’d gone to the hospital in an ambulance to get checked out, but she was okay. I can still remember bursting into tears, yelling, “Maureen’s dead!” To me, “hit by a car” meant killed, and my dad must have been lying about her being okay. I didn’t calm down until Maureen came back home, and Mom took me next door to see for myself.

When Maureen and I were living together in Lincoln, we had a tiny aquarium. We were young and still just learning to be responsible, so it may not surprise you to learn that one day, we noticed our fish were floating. Neither of us had the stomach to fish them out (pun intended) and flush them, so we invited friends over for dinner (spaghetti) and sweet-talked them into disposing of the fish. We were learning about our own strengths and weaknesses—we gave away the fish tank. 

Most recently, Maureen was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that had spread to her lungs. She was still living in NY, and every fiber of my being wanted to hop on a plane and go. But Maureen didn’t want visitors beyond her daughters. She was determined to fight, and she didn’t want distractions, sadness, or pessimistic energy around while she was doing that, which I completely understand. In the end, her departure was too swift and everyone too stunned for me to get there in time. So like too many other times in the recent past, I’ve had to test my beliefs about life & death—Maureen is helping me learn even now.

There are people in our lives we may not see often enough, but on whom our equilibrium somehow depends. We just need to know they’re out there somewhere we can get to if need be. Maureen is one of those people in my life, and I’m trying hard to be at peace with her being out of my reach now. In the meantime, I’m so grateful for every single memory—our joyful last visit and the lifetime of happy, crazy, challenging, angry, stubborn, silly, informing and forming moments that came before that. I am who I am in part because Maureen, my fellow student in this incarnation, my patient teacher, my dear friend, is in my life still and always. Oo-OO-oo, Maureen...