My BFFfC Amy and I Are Soon To Reunite and Dance Together Again, at a Cure Concert

I have a BFFfC, a best friend forever from college, Amy, whom I met some 35 years ago, and I can’t help but believe that she earned this designation in small part because of that shared setting and station in life. University is where most of us first exercise our independence from our family; it is where we experiment a bit and indulge; it is simultaneously a playground and a primer for professional life. When we’re lucky it delivers years of novel moments and relationships we treasure. This Amy most assuredly did for me.

But Amy I believe is my BFFfC mostly for one simple reason: I got lucky.

Those exceptional friends who align with you and stick with you for life arrive from all vistas and venues: at work or school, as neighbors, teammates, or accidental acquaintances in airports. We can get lucky with love, but the luck is no less significant I think when it is assigned to him or her who even at a great distance answers every trouble bell at every hour, year after year, or simply helps make long weekend reunions fresh keepsake sets of smiles, laughter, bad dancing, and photos.

Amy was a little sister to the fraternity I pledged at the University of Dayton, dated and then married a great friend from that fraternity, Tim, and grew especially close to me as I earned a graduate degree from our school. To quote one of my favorite literary characters, Shakespeare’s Falstaff, Amy and I spent 5-plus years in southwest Ohio in the 1980s hearing the chimes of midnight a few times. But also a good deal more. Amy enveloped me in her family and its Ohio experiences precisely at a time when mine was unraveling.

Tim was captain of our school hockey team, and when he was on weekend roadtrips in the winter I had an enforcer’s responsibility back at our frat house: the sacred and solemn responsibility of ensuring that Amy was safeguarded from the advances of too-well-beered brothers. I did my job well enough to earn the honor of writing and delivering a reminiscence of their undergraduate love at their wedding.

On our fraternity porch Amy and I especially bonded over the songs of our era. College radio perhaps reached its apex of appeal in the 1980s, and staples of it — REM, the Smiths, the Cure — were with their respective catalogues as much our social companions as our fraternity members. All these years later, Amy and I still delight in regularly sharing cell phone screen captures of our university years bands as their songs arrive on satellite radio in our cars.

I have too many favorite memories of my BFFfC from school, quite a few lodged in beer fogs and distant time, but one reunion one years afterward is seared into my heart, forever. Tim and I schemed to surprise Amy with a weekend visit I’d make to their home near Cincinnati. This was about 20 years ago. I simply drove out from D.C. one summer Friday, parked my Jeep in the lot of the neighborhood golf club where I knew my pal was lunching with her sister, snuck up on Amy’s table, met her shocked gaze, and hugged the life out of her after her primal glee-scream. The other diners I think intuitively understood the novelty of the moment. Perhaps a few of them were Dayton Flyers, too.

A few years back Tim and Amy and I reunited with Jim and Becky Kronk from our Flyer class. The Kronks live in Columbus. Annually now ours is a party of five whose revelry I think is rarely matched, by anyone, anywhere in Ohio. Amy is our DJ for those. At our most recent reunion last year Amy was still downloading ‘80s tracks for our bad dancing at 2:30 in the morning.

Today in New England I live more than 1,000 miles away from my precious pal and her precious family, and the Kronks, and I feel that separation acutely.

April 2023 beat me up a bit, and this past Thursday I emailed Tim with a novel request. Back in February Amy mentioned that the Cure would be touring the U.S. this summer, touring perhaps for the final time. We didn’t do anything with that wonderful and exciting bit of news, but now I wanted to. Now I needed to. Friend, I said in my email, could you possibly put my pal on a plane to New York in late June, and allow me to take her to see the Cure at Madison Square Garden, a fun Amtrak ride for me from Maine?

And: Much like 20 years ago, let’s make it a surprise for Amy!

Tim is a good deal smarter than I am, and he hatched an even better scheme. The Cure, he noted, is in Ohio on Sunday night the weekend of June 10 . . . Reunion Weekend at the University of Dayton. What if . . .

Thursday quickly became a fabulous frenzy of email and text messaging organization. Crazy fun. The Kronks chimed in with spirited consent from vacation on some Caribbean island. Importantly, Amy was kept in the dark. My hurt of April suddenly gave way to the greatest possible euphoria in May: I was going to see my BFFfC again soon, for hugs never more needed, while we shared Ohio soil for beer swaying with Robert Smith.

Apparently though I’m nowhere near as good at keeping secrets from Amy as I was 20 years ago. Or perhaps: Some moments are simply too euphoric to sequester in secret. The grand scheme stayed hidden about 90 minutes Thursday before I sent Amy betraying word.

I like to think that on the other end of that text my Ohio friend glee-screamed a bit again. “You made my day,” she replied.

Thursday night the Cure kicked off their 2023 tour in New Orleans. I was on YouTube absorbing the gig’s footage from attendees in something close to real time. I know the setlist (it’s spectacular), and my Flyer friends in Ohio already know that in our section on June 11 there will be very, very bad dancing. Very, very good bad dancing.