acrylic on canvas
I’ve known Rica a long, long time; back before the moment captured in this portrait, with us posed outside St. Vincent, proudly brandishing our Spelling Bee ribbons. She eventually moved away and attended a different high school, then somehow wound up in Hawaii for college. We reconnected in our early 20s, after her triumphant return to the mainland, and we became fast night club buddies, spending wild weekends at Ka-Boom, Shelter and other Chicago hot spots from back in the day.
Then real life kicked in as it always does, where careers and fate conspired to pull us apart once again. For close to ten years, I had no idea what had become of my dear old friend and spelling bee competitor; until fate, airplanes and limousines stepped in.
My husband works as a limousine dispatcher, where most of his job centers around telephone conversations with customers looking for vehicles at O’Hare or Midway airports. During the course of a typical work week, he might talk to a thousand different people, heading in and out of town for various nefarious reasons, but one night a familiar name from our past appeared on his logs. Rica, or someone with the same exact name as our mutual friend, was on the line, looking for a ride home. It was a busy shift, with four dispatchers on duty, four phone lines ringing off the hook, but somehow Rica (who we’d later discover had just moved back to Chicago from Texas) was on the line with Scott. With several phone calls in the cue, and the herky-jerk chaos associated with a busy livery office, Scott paused and asked if she was the same person who had grown up with Joyce Dino on the west side of Chicago. There was silence, and then a yes. Yes! She grew up with Joyce Dino. Yes, it’s the same Rica.
Fast forward to almost two years later, and she’s every bit as much a part of my life as back in the day, when we wore funny skirts at St. Angela. She’s one of the “good things” in my life, and much has happened since the unexpected phone call brought us back together. We’ve shared dinners, wine and fun. Made new memories, and talked of good times from the past. We’ve organized a class reunion from our elementary school, and reconnected with the other two young ladies from this portrait, as well as many, many others. We’ve joined the Facebook craze and expanded our networks even further. We have vacations planned for next year and beyond.
As I painted this, I thought about how astonishing this was for me personally. Astonishing, really, but not unusual. You hear stories all the time of friends and family losing touch with one another, then reconnecting. It’s really a universal theme of the human experience. It’s why we wake up, go to work and pick up the phone. You never know who’s going to be on the other end. It’s reconnecting with those dear to you which makes life worth living.
