Heaven can wait, we're only watching the stars

I'm heading home for Thanksgiving. Updated my Facebook status to ask if any of my hometown homies are up for a beer. Did this after thinking about saving time to hang out with Bernard, the friend I always met up with every time I went home after the summer of 1987. He's still the first person I want to see when I'm home after all these years.

I met Bernard for the first time in elementary school. He was a gawky, tow-headed kid who barely spoke English (his mom was German and his dad was in the Army). We had some classes together sporadically for the next few years and saw each other at the skating rink on weekends.

When we were in 8th grade we really bonded. We skipped school for the first time together. The details are murky, but I think he, our friend April and I hid out in the woods before school started, then walked back to my house. What a glorious day that was! I remember we watched a lot of daytime television, and at some point we had a water-throwing fight that culminated in the breaking of one of my mama's vases. We glued it back together. It took my mama weeks to notice, and I blamed it on my little sister. I fessed up years later when I was in college.

In 1983, we started high school. We were two dorky 14-year-olds desperate to appear cool. Duran Duran were our idols then, and we emulated them down to their footwear of choice: leather jazz shoes with no socks. I took mine off in Bernard's presence once and he told me to put them back on because my feet stank. Everyone's feet stank during those heady, heel-blistered, sockless days.

I think we were about 15 when Bernard and I got the lofty idea to have ourselves a fancy dinner. Somehow, we got the opportunity to go to Hills' and do our own shopping and cook it at my house with nobody else around. We bought frozen pizza bites, Pac-Man ravioli and a single frozen lobster. We put the lobster in the microwave for several minutes, then sat staring at it, as neither of us had ever eaten lobster and we weren't sure how to go about doing it.

Throughout high school, the two of us behaved like immature siblings. We were notorious for getting into fights, not speaking for several weeks, then getting right back together and never mentioning -- because we'd usually forgotten -- what we were fighting about.

Bernard and I went shopping for school clothes at Independence Mall in Wilmington when we were 16 and we both spent all of our babysitting money. Bernard bought Alexander Julian multicolored shirts and I bought Alphaville's "Forever Young" and made him play it over and over on the cassette deck for the next two years.

At the beginning of our senior year, after not speaking all summer, we went to a party on the beach at Ocean Isle with a bunch of our classmates. Bernard somehow managed to lose his class ring. We went up to the arcade to borrow a flashlight, but we couldn't find the ring. The next day, a few of us went back and there it was, plain as day, on top of the sand.

Right there on the sand. That's where we'd stare at the stars. That's where we dreamed about a world outside our hometown, where we could go and be anything we wanted to be.

Bernard and I continued our glory days through college. Even though I moved away and he stayed, we always hung out when I came home. We'd get a six pack and drive up and down the island. Then we'd lie on the hood of his car and watch the moon go by.

There's the story of us driving our summer friend home to Virginia with a missing gas cap in Bernard's Samurai, terrified to throw cigarettes out the window lest we blow up. And us getting pulled over by the Myrtle Beach police outside our favorite late-night breakfast house hours after we "accidentally" drove past the parking deck attendant at the Pavillion. Oh, and Bernard putting the gas nozzle into the tank, going in to pay, coming out and driving off and gas from the nozzle spewing everywhere. (I thought it would be absolutely hysterical to call him the next morning and say, "Dude, are you watching the news? The gas station blew up!" But he could see through me and said, "Yeah, that's really funny, Leigh Ann.")

Then there was the night we decided to sleep on the beach, got some pillows and blankets from Bernard's mama's house and set up camp, only to be awakened two hours later by a massive lightning storm. We spent the next few hours in the car waiting for the sun to come up, as I was staying with my parents and therefore restricted to girl rules and had "massaged" the truth about where I was spending that night.

Fast-forward a couple of years. Bernard was friends with my sister Jill because she and he both came to Raleigh to stay with me and go to bars and shows. Back home, he got to be friends with my youngest sister, Amy. They made the same trip to Virginia together Bernard and I had made together years before to see our friend graduate from college.

I remember clear as day sitting on the front steps of the house I grew up in stunned silence, feeling not much of anything as people came and went after Amy died in 1994. Then Bernard pulled up in his Jeep. We ran to meet each other halfway, threw our arms around each other and sunk to the ground crying on each others' shoulders. Bernard was an honorary pallbearer at Amy's funeral, and he was with Jill and me at sunset when we saw a double rainbow stretch across Ocean Isle Beach.

We continued to meet up either at home or in Raleigh for years, but grownup responsibilities caused those meetings to be further and further apart.

I got married in June 2006. It was a very small ceremony at Mordecai Chapel here in Raleigh. I ran my announcement in our hometown weekly a few weeks later. My mama called and left a message on my answering machine of Bernard's message on her answering machine. "Hey. I saw Leigh Ann's announcement in the paper. Please tell her I'm happy for her and I love her."

Four weeks later, my daddy called me before my alarm clock went off to tell me Bernard had gotten killed in a car accident a mile away from his mama's home, where he was living. He'd gone out for cigarettes and had both his beloved dachsunds with him. One died on impact with him, one was found wandering the road the next day.

April and I got together for the first time in years to go to Bernard's funeral. We alternately laughed and cried as we remembered the three of us chasing each other around under the pier, when Bernard cut quickly to the side and we smacked into each other, nearly knocking ourselves out cold. And Bernard ran off laughing.

April, my English husband she'd never met before and I had lunch at the Giggling Mackeral on the island, then went back to my parents' house to get ready. We stood in front of the vanity we'd stood in front of hundreds of times before when we were young, including the time Bernard and I decided to dye the ends of our blond hair black like the girl in Berlin, with April in charge of applying the can't-color-over-this, jet-black hair dye.

The emotions we couldn't control caused me to shake uncontrollably and April to sweat profusely. My mama came in the bathroom and asked, "Why are you shaking and why are you sweating?!" April and I started laughing hysterically. I couldn't speak, but April managed to gasp out the words, "Well, because we're burying our best friend who died tragically too young and I'm really sorry but this isn't something we've ever done before!" And we laughed until we couldn't catch our breath.

At the funeral, I greeted classmates I hadn't seen in nearly 20 years, viewed pictures of Bernard that included shots of the two of us together and him holding my baby nephew, and cried my heart out on my husband's shoulder mourning a friend he never got to meet.

Every now and then I think of something I need to tell Bernard. I can remember how he enunciated every syllable and hear the sound of his voice. I can't believe how much I still miss him.

But I'll always know and remember him like he was when we were young and the world was wide open to us, because I know he's re-experiencing that feeling in the great beyond. When I see him there someday, we'll be lying on our backs on the sand under the Ocean Isle moonlight, being together without saying a word. Just like we used to.

Alphaville - Forever Young