best friends beshert

Beshert | Bestie In My Building, Part II

When I wrote my first Beshert piece, it was during happier, more carefree times. I’d just met my bestie after living in the apartment above hers for a lonely year. And then came COVID-19.  When Washington, D.C. went into lockdown, we decided that she’d quarantine with my family. We both worked from home and made our own hours. Every afternoon, like Lucy and Ethel, we sat on my blue velvet couch and screamed at the TV, a pair of middle-aged women cracking jokes through our fear as we watched the world spin out of control. It was like watching a never-ending apocalyptic movie. We weren't glamorous, nor camera-ready. We skipped social niceties like getting seriously dressed. We never knew what day of the week it was because we had nowhere to go but the couch.  We knew...

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Janet Nussbaum

Beshert | Finding My Childhood Bestie—60 Years Later!

My beshert moment on that unforgettable day wrapped me in so many memories of my childhood. In the early 1940s, as kids growing up in the Bronx, New York, we walked to school with our friends and played in the streets until dark without fear or worry. We enjoyed marbles, which we kept in our fathers’ old cigar boxes; jacks on the sidewalk, chalk to draw and play games in the street and so many more inventive ways to have fun. My best friend was Bernice Goldfeder from the time I was five until moves and marriages separated us.     Fast forward to the 2000s. I had left New York and relocated to Washington, DC in 2002. I made a happy life for myself there with a few wonderful new friends and the blessing of my daughter...

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Beshert | Shareyna and Kim

Long before fused celebrity names like “Brangelina” (now back to Brad and Angelina) became trendy, my college roommate and I were known as “Shareyna.” Thirty-six years ago this fall, Reyna and I met as Yale freshmen after a guy friend asked me why I switched back and forth between two outfits every day and I realized that he must be mistaking me for someone else with a similar face but different clothes. I had watched “The Parent Trap” (friends mix up identical twins who meet for the first time at camp) enough times to know that this meant I had a doppelganger.  It turned out that my twin-like double lived three floors below me. Reyna was another five-foot-four, dark-haired young woman from the shared gene pool of Eastern European Jews. We stood next to one another...

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