The Lunch Table

Twenty two years ago a scared little freshman girl walked into the lunchroom on her first day of highschool.  She didn't know anybody in her lunch period, and was forced to walk around, cafeteria tray in hand, and find a table to sit at.  As luck would have it, she found a table of a few freshman girls that happened to have an empty seat.  I don't recall exactly what she said, but she asked if she could join the group for lunch.  She feared the response she would get and knew that it could have been ugly.  She could have chosen a table full of snobs that would shun her and make her feel even more alone.  But that wasn't the case at all.  She chose the right table indeed, and the rest as they say, was history.

She would spend the next four years getting to know those girls and their grade school friends, and becoming a part of their group.  The five of them spent their highschool years together, and maintained their friendship through college.  They were by each other's sides through boyfriends, break-ups, moves, job changes, family crisis, engagements, weddings, pregnancies and births.  They stuck together through moves that put a few of them across the country or, at times, across the ocean.  As the years went on, their get-togethers became fewer, and more time would pass between them, but they never stopped.  And when they would happen, it was like no time had passed at all.

Twenty two years after she took that long walk up to her lunch table, she sat and watched one of her best friends take her own long walk down the aisle.  And she thanked God for that fateful day that she chose the right lunch table to sit at.

Brett's wedding - December 12, 2009

me, Ellen, Michelle, Corinne and Heather