When good friends do
so much to enrich your life

Robyn’s Hood
By Robyn McCloskey

I realize how dangerous it is in life to play favorites, but I must admit that one of my most favorite friends is a woman named Sue. She’s one of those people that everyone just loves. She’s smart, she’s fun, she’s pretty and she is always a whirlwind of activity. She is happily married to a great guy and has four equally great children.
I first met Sue when we moved to Newtown Borough more than four years ago. She promptly showed up at my door with a plate of homemade cookies (I liked her right away, not only for bringing me cookies but for referring to her slice-and-bake cookies as homemade!) and a card listing the names and ages of her kids, as well as her phone number if I ever I needed anything.
Last year Sue and her family moved out of the neighborhood and into a new one, and even though it’s only a mile away, the place hasn’t been the same since. Her house was the fun house, the impromptu get-together house, the house you could drop in on at any time of the day or night and always feel welcome.
The very day she moved into her new house she threw a party, because it happened to be on the same day that our town was having a fireworks display and their new back yard was the perfect viewing spot.
Sue knows everyone, and the few she doesn’t, she talks to as if she does. Which can make it a bit arduous to venture out in public with her, but I do anyway, since she’s usually worth the aggravation. We’ve all taken to referring to Sue as the mayor of Newtown even though she’s originally from Massachusetts. And although she has lived all over the country with her Naval Academy graduate husband, she stubbornly holds fast to her New England accent.
When a teacher suggested speech therapy for her oldest son because it seemed he could not pronounce the letter "r", she told the teacher, "No one in ouwah family pronounces the lettah ‘aahh’," quickly bringing an end to the therapy dilemma.
She also fervently holds fast to her overuse of the word "wicked", as in "It was wicked hot today," or "I was wicked late for my spin class." She claims that this too is a holdover from her Massachusetts upbringing.
Last weekend was the first anniversary of her family’s move to their new home. In keeping with tradition, Sue threw another party, or should I say pahty? There was the usual eclectic mix of people you’d come to expect from Sue, plus the addition of a friend from high school who came with her husband and kids for the weekend.
I was dying to meet this friend, Katie, since it is always a crack-up to hear old Sue stories. Katie was warm and friendly, as I expected her to be. I asked her what brought them to town for the weekend, besides the allure of spending time with her former classmate. She said her husband Ron was involved in a baseball tournament being held in the Philadelphia area.
I came to find out that it wasn’t your everyday, run-of-the-mill baseball game. In fact it wasn’t even called baseball. It’s called "beepball," which is very similar to baseball, except that most of the players are blind.
Every team has two sighted players, the pitcher and the catcher. Ron is the sighted pitcher for a team known as the Boston Renegades. Rather than play by sight, the players play by sound. The ball and the bases are equipped with sound transmitters to help players determine their location.
Katie told me that Ron had been volunteering with the organization for about six years, and that the team practices twice a week from March through August and travels about four times a year to participate in tournaments.
I didn’t get to meet Ron or tell him how much I admired the way he spent his free time. But knowing Sue, I’ll get to meet him eventually, probably at next year’s fireworks extravaganza.
I am also clinging to the belief of the old adage that birds of a feather flock together. With the kind of person Sue is, and the company she keeps, I can only hope to remain in her nest. It’s wicked awesome. ••
Robyn McCloskey’s column appears each week in the Northeast Times. She can be reached at crmccloskey@verizon.net