I don’t remember when I first encountered TBV, probably over at Haisley. My first coherent memory of her is watching her stand in Vet’s Pool throwing her daycare kids into the water. They were having a great time and so was she. I remember her wearing an absolutely trenormous pair of plastic blue earrings, probably two by four inches. (Eventually those earrings destroyed her holes but that was okay, she went out and got new ones pierced plus a couple more on each ear lobe, just like the cool kids. Me? I didn’t even HAVE pierced ears then. Finally got it done at age 37. Really.)

I was immediately attracted to this exuberantly over-the-top woman but I didn’t think we’d ever be friends. A meek little person like me could never approach someone like that and I doubted she’d ever notice me. I was definitely not in her league. And then, we *were* friends. I don’t remember exactly how that happened either but by the time our younger children landed in a rather dysfunctional first grade class we were good buddies. Many mornings, we would drop our “pea pods” (her phrase) off and take off walking all over the neighborhood, downtown for coffee, or whatever. I could go on and on about all the volunteer stuff we did over the years but you would click away in about a nano-second.

One of my fav-o-rite stories about TBV *ever* is The Purple Room. At one point in time, TBV doubled the size of her [then] house. I walked by that house a LOT and into it quite a bit (without knocking, just like at the moominbeach when I was a kid) and this one weekend, I walked by her house a few times and it kind of looked like she was painting the living room purple. I mean ROYAL purple, not some subtle pastel shade of purple. That Sunday morning, I was walking by and TBV, dressed in a royal purple exercise outfit, grabbed me off the sidewalk. “Come and look at this!” Yes, all of the walls were purple. Royal purple. It was beautiful. Except that it was the *living* room. Later that day, for whatever reason, I was walking by there *again* and her husband and sons had returned from a weekend scouting trip. Hubby was sitting on the porch with a dazed look in his eye. A neighbor was yelling from down the street maybe 10 houses away, “Got a purple living room?”

A long long long time ago, another friend who didn’t know TBV very well [yet] once referred to her as “the woman who never has a bad day”. But TBV does have bad days. Just like we all do. I was friends with her on bad days. This woman may have some bad days but ain’t no way she will be kept down. Nowadays? She has moved far away from the Haisley neighborhood. She is doing very well and yesterday, we were honored to attend a holiday open house at her beautiful new house, a half hour away from mine. Old friends and new friends were there and, even though our children are grown and we have moved on to new jobs et al, we still fall into conversation as if we were dropping off our 1st graders again. Disclaimer: I did not partake of the $230 bottle of bourbon.

TBV has been a role model for me as well as a friend and I love her. Who knew, all those years ago at Vet’s Pool (which I pretty much hated) that the over-the-top woman wearing huge earrings and throwing 5-year-olds into the pool would become one of my BFFs.

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