The Best Boat Buddy

On a very rainy November day in 1977, I was seven years old and my mom was unusually late picking me up from school. As students began to trickle out to their waiting buses or parents, I was left behind. Anxiety and fear started to gnaw at me. A fellow seven year old neighborhood playmate, Susan, was left behind as well. Selfishly, this made me feel better to have her familiar face as company. The school seemed less dark and cavernous with her tiny red headed presence beside me. I think Susan and I were both scared, but she seemed less so.

Minutes feel like hours when you’re seven years old. What seemed like an eternity later, we were given word that our respective mothers literally could not reach us. A tropical depression had collided with a tropical storm off the coast of northern New Jersey and was lashing our hometown with a half a foot of rain in under twenty four hours.

Susan and I lived three streets away from the Ramapo River.( Pronounced ram –uh -poh) Ramapo is an Algonquin word from the Lenape people meaning, “sweet water.” The Ramapo is normally a lazy meandering river, but it was now overflowing its banks by fourteen rapidly churning feet. If memory serves, we were driven by a fireman as close to the river as we could safely go, before we were told to exit the truck.

Faced with a rapidly coursing river, torrential rainfall, and minimal daylight left, Susan and I were told we had to get into a small boat and cross the river if we wanted to go home. Wide eyed and terrified, I don’t remember if I stuck like glue to Susan, but I know that the only way I was getting into that boat was with my pint sized boat buddy. Susan and I made it across the raging river, and our friendship was cemented in that moment forever.

This year brought the worst storm into my life. The day my husband died, the flood waters threatened to rise above me. I was lost and afraid. I phoned my boat buddy and told her the awful news.

I remember Susan saying, “What can I do?”

To which I replied without thinking, “You could come here.”

I hung up the phone and tried to sleep, but sleep was like quicksilver, eluding my grasp. I got up the next day, barely functioning, knowing I had to face a raging river of decisions and emotions that threatened to drown me.

I remember walking down the stairs into my kitchen, and there she was. My boat buddy. Susan’s peaceful presence, her red hair, her calm smile was right there. She had traveled 48 years, three hundred and sixty miles to get back in the boat with me and help me across the roiling waters, one more time.

Susan held my hand at the funeral home when I had to sign off on my husband’s death certificate. She made me laugh by sternly admonishing the funeral home employee who was was fighting getting a hearing aid, “You need to listen to your wife, it’s definitely your hearing.” She held my hand again at city hall when I was handed the official death certificate, and shared in my aggravation when I realized there were misspellings on it. Susan is a professional proofreader, so we are mutually offended at stuff like that. Susan helped me to eat just by sitting next to me, because otherwise food tasted like ash.

My precious boat buddy remembered me with tenderness even after she returned home. Susan understood that the aftermath of the storm was going to continue and sent me a six month supply of tissues, with lotion, because she overheard me say my nose was being turned into sandpaper from all the crying and blowing into scratchy napkins. She frequently checks in on me, helping me to breathe and process my emotions when the dark waters of grief threaten to overflow my boat again.

Susan’s calming presence reminds me of when Jesus was napping in a boat with his disciples.

 A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped.  Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm. He said to his disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?” They were terrified and asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!” Mark 4:37-41.

Storms in life are inevitable. Having a boat buddy is crucial. Susan is a fabulous boat buddy, of that I have no doubt. ( She’s mine though, so don’t get any ideas.) But Jesus is the Best Boat Buddy, and I am happy to share him.

Lord Jesus, I pray for those who are reading this right now, who are afraid of the storm that has rocked their boat, that they would call upon your holy name – the Name above all names – that they would know that you have the power to rebuke the wind and the waves, so they needn’t fear. Amen.

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