12. Simply The Beth

You’ve met a Beth before. You know them when you see them — they light up a room, they’re genuinely curious about how you’re doing, they love life. And Nora loves her Beth.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

INTRO MUSIC

Imagine a person who looks at the world with total interest and fascination and very little – if any – judgment. At all. A person who will look a child in the eye and listen to his impassioned explanation of how a battle bot works, and why his battle bot is superior to his brother’s. A person who learns that a kid is interested in insects and spends time researching ways to create a mostly self-sustaining terrarium so that this kid can keep spiders and scorpions and whatever other creepy little thing he catches in the backyard right in his bedroom even though his mother is a squeamish little baby. 

Imagine that this person is in her early 60s with a silver pixie cut that she just dyed a pinky-lavendar, and that her arms are covered in hand drawn tattoos because she bought a semi-permanent tattoo marker online so that the aforementioned kids could draw her some tattoos. That when she wanders away from you and your children at the flea market you don’t recognize her when you cross paths again. You should because she’s always wearing at least three different kinds of patterns, but she slips right by you because she’s just bought the perfect hat – a crochet beanie shaped like a little pig face. She loves it because it goes with her car’s seat covers, which are, obviously, pig print.

Imagine that she feeds the birds in her backyard so often that she knows their social patterns and has names for them, and she shares these videos with you on a regular basis so you can enjoy the splendor of wildlife that doesn’t want to visit your backyard because you have a chihuahua and a bunch of crows who hog all the birdseed.

The person you’re imagining is my friend Beth. Or, my mom’s friend Beth who is now my friend Beth, and one of my kids’ very favorite people on the Earth. 

Ralph: Well, she’ll take me bug shopping, she’ll take me to Pokemon card stores, she’ll take me to antique stores. She’ll take me to lots of places! Beth is simply the Beth. She kind of has a way of always making everything better. 

We love Beth because Beth. Loves. Everything. She loves them without apology, without explanation. She is so excited about your life, even the boring parts, that you can’t help but be a little bit more excited about your life after you interact with her. Beth is biologically in her 60s, but she is ageless, timeless, a fairy sent from another world.

Ralph: Beth looks like she’s in her 30s. I feel like she uses a lot of Botox and just doesn’t tell us. 

Nora: Beth does not use Botox!

Ralph: Like, a ton of it. She has an entire closet!

Beth by the way, I cannot say this enough, Beth has never gotten Botox. I have gotten it, Beth has not.

One of the joys of life is friendship, finding and nurturing a relationship that has nothing to do with blood relation or romance, an additional root to stabilize and sustain you in this shaky world. 

Beth’s friendship is all of those things, but mostly it is joy: unbridled, unedited, unapologetic.

Beth will come to dinner and bring only desserts, as instructed, and then make everyone at the table feel like the most fascinating person in the world. She will leave a stand at the Farmer’s Market only after making sure the vendor knows that they are fantastic, amazing, a gift to this world. They are going to make it, baby! She will leave a diner knowing our server’s middle name, her star sign and her loftiest dreams, which Beth will assure her are within her reach.

Beth often comes bearing gifts, for no reason at all. She sees something that makes her think of someone, and she brings it over. She doesn’t wait for a birthday or a traditional gifting holiday, she just hands it to you and says “here! I thought of you!” 

But the real gift is Beth. Is being around a person who is so genuinely excited about other people, their lives, a crocheted pig hat. I have found that moods are contagious, and I have not always been mindful of the way my own can affect the weather in a room, or in a group of people. And maybe Beth isn’t, either. Maybe she’s just naturally a sunbeam that can cut through a storm cloud, maybe she’s just naturally a wondrous person whose curiosity awakens your own sense of how thrilling it can be to be alive in this world. 

But she is – as our kids say – Simply the Beth.

OUTRO MUSIC

I’m Nora McInerny. And this is It’s Going To Be Okay.

CREDITS