So many memories have been flooding back to me with the passing of Tiff. Our friendship began in third grade and it involved trading pictures of Shaun Cassidy. She had some good ones from Tiger Beat. It grew the next year when were in the same fourth grade homeroom class.
There were a lot of firsts in my friendship with Tiffiny. She invited me to my first slumber party, and it was the classic 10-year old girl’s slumber party at the height of The Bee Gees and Andy Gibb. We navigated from Middle School to Junior High and all the drama that entails, Tiff was the friend I first confided in when my parents divorced, and I tried my best to there for her when her parents divorced.
She went with me for my first official concert with The Stray Cats and Dave Edmunds at the Col Ballroom in Davenport, not to mention my first Mississippi Valley Blues festival with John Lee Hooker at Le Claire Park. Tiff didn’t dig it as much as I did! She also was the first of my immediate friends to get her driver’s license. She drove over to my house in her family’s black Ford Bronco to bring me a me piece of her birthday cake.
Her passion for the White Sox was not to be ignored either, especially their season of Winning Ugly. I had always been around baseball with my brothers, but this was a whole new experience. And, she could hold her own with stats too. In fact, she talked me into being a statistician for the varsity boys basketball team the year they made it to state.
Once we found our way into the “real world”, we wrote letters back and forth from our locations. She stayed in our hometown, and I ventured off to Colorado to art school. We kept each other in the loop of milestones of our lives in those letters. Our adult lives took us in different directions as she moved into motherhood and took up the badge of Boy Mom with great pride, while I tried living in different areas of the Midwest before settling down at one address that didn’t have to be updated every year.
And like so many of us, we kept in touch with each other on Facebook. If there was a post of Snoopy, it usually was from Tiff. And like all of us, when I first heard of her passing, I immediately checked on Facebook to see if it was true, and my heart sank to see someone had posted “R.I.P. Tiff.”
The outpouring of love for Tiffiny from the people in her life reflects exactly the friend I always knew that she was and I hope it offers some comfort to her sons Drew and Brady along with her family they are going to have a lot of firsts without her.
The world may change from year to year, our lives from day to day, but the memory and impact of a good friend will never fade away.
