'You're lucky, Kid'.

The older of my two sons called from his job in New York to tell me he had just bought his airline ticket home. "I want to be there for Passover," he said. If he had thought at all about Easter, he didn't mention it. I paused, and thought of my old friend Beebe. She was Jewish. Smart and very funny, she seemed to know everyone in Chicago, and could name-drop with the best of them. She would have liked the news about my son's holiday plans.

Both my sons attended public junior and senior high school in a suburb that was predominantly Jewish, and even now the Jewish holidays remain prominent on their radar. Growing up, whenever they mentioned that they were Catholic, people just said, "Don't worry about it." Beebe regarded our friendship in similar fashion, and was always interested in my sons and their Jewish sensibilities. For years as I watched them mature in a cultural terrain unfamiliar to me, I relied on Beebe for practical advice and comic relief. I loved her for many reasons, her Jewishness being one of them. But damn if she wasn't dead.

"What about Easter?" I finally asked my son. "Mom, by that time, Stronberg, Perlstein, and Woolman will have all left town." I saw his point. How could dinner and the long Easter Sunday afternoon compare with a chance to spend time joking with his friends? Besides, I told myself, they have Mass in Manhattan, don't they?

I met Beebe before my sons were born. She was the powerhouse receptionist at the office where I worked. Many years older than I was (number never mentioned), she took me under her wing as a friend, a dear, a protege. Once, at lunch, when I marveled at her long-standing political commitments, I asked: "Beebe, have you ever thought of running for office yourself?" She looked up from her soup and answered: "Why? Do I look crooked?"

Although I welcomed the opportunity to raise my sons in a Jewish milieu, after a few years I came to realize that without a few trappings of Catholicism, a kid can seem less ... well, Catholic. To allay my uneasiness, I used to seek Beebe's counsel on the phone. She wanted to hear all the silly stories and then try to make them funnier. She especially liked the one about my sons teasing me at a confirmation about shaking hands with "the guy in the purple yarmulke."

Beebe thrived on romance, but turned down marriage proposals. An only child and devoted daughter, she cherished her father's memory and took care of her adored mother. After her mother's death, I had a privileged conversation with Beebe. It was the only one that ever veered near religious faith. We spoke of eternal life, and I eagerly assured her, as an Irish Catholic would, that she would one day see her mother again. I realize now my insistence must have sounded naive. Beebe took my hand. "You're lucky, Kid," she sighed. "You really believe that, don't you?"

Beebe could be circumspect. When my older son left for college, she expressed concern at his choice of a small Jesuit school in Connecticut. His friends were headed to the Big Ten and the giant dorms of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Didn't he want to keep up his contacts? I convinced her that he would always remain loyal to his friends, but that a Catholic environment would both reinforce his roots and, perhaps counterintuitively, expand his horizons.

I was right about the multicultural aspects. Soon his calls to Chicago were filled with the tales of Sweeney, McGinley, and O'Day. Beebe enjoyed the anecdotes of his Irish reawakening, but was clearly relieved when he got back on track in his sophomore year. By then, Stronberg had gone east to visit the campus and had praised Sweeney on guitar; Perlstein had become friends with McGinley; and Woolman had invited O'Day to stay with a friend's family in Vegas. When I shared fragments of gossip like this with Beebe, I would indulge her weakness for any detail about the old high school crowd. Her laughter would lift the nonsense into that rarefied private place that good friends recognize at once.

Beebe saw my sons only occasionally over twenty-five years, and I wonder now how we could have always been so busy. She and I shared a friendship that was grounded in phone conversations and in getting together downtown for lunch. She was the only person who ever called me Kid. My sons were "her boys," and they sensed a vivid connection with her. She joked about their Jewish frame of reference but could not disguise her deep cultural pride.

Sometimes my sons remind me that Beebe liked Frank Sinatra and even recited a line of "One for My Baby" as the greeting on her answering machine. She would be thrilled to know they remember. Eternal life takes on rich, varied forms.

Diane Filbin is a freelance writer in Chicago. Her article on churchgoing appeared in the February 28, 2003, issue, and was selected for The Best Catholic Writing 2004 (Loyola).