Read Online The Ten Best Days of My Life by Adena Halpern - Free Book Online

face and people around him holding meters and shining reflectors at his body. I wondered if in that one moment in the guy’s life, none of the bad stuff mattered. It didn’t matter that he was homeless or had to go through Dumpsters for food. At that point he was the richest man in the world, and it had nothing to do with money: all eyes were on him and that’s why he was smiling.
    Then again, the whole picture could have been staged. He might have been an actor making $500, the crackly face was makeup, and they blacked out his teeth. I go back and forth with these conclusions from time to time. It depends on my mood.
    Either way, I sent them ten bucks and then they bombarded me with junk mail for the rest of my life (addressed to Mr. Alexander Dorenfield, which was annoying in its own right), but that’s beside the point. They did bring up a remarkable question.
    The second question I’ve always thought about is this: how many friends do you really need in the world? Remember that famous Lee Iacocca quote? He was the president of some car company, was it Chrysler? It doesn’t matter. Anyway, he said . . . actually, it wasn’t even him who said it, it was his dad, but he paraphrased it. He said, “My father said, ‘If you’ve got five real friends, you’ve had a great life.’ ”
    I think that’s bull.
    I think if you have one real friend, you don’t need any backup. And you can quote me on that (just make sure the quote is attributed to Ms. Alexandra Dorenfield and not Mr. Alexander, ha!).
    I had a lot of friends in my short time on earth. When I look back, I see a lot of dinners, a lot of clubbing, a lot of partying. I see shopping and gossiping. I see the friends I made in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Some of them were really nice people. Still, none of them were friends with a capital F .
    See, I have the greatest friend that anyone could ever have. After her there was no point in getting close to anyone else.
    I met my best friend, Penelope Goldstein, in the fourth grade at the Friends School. But before I tell you about her, I have to give you a little more background so you can get the whole picture.
    I’ve always been sort of misunderstood (at least I felt that way). As you know, I’m special. I was a miracle baby. Not only was I a miracle baby, I was also an only child. I was also an only grandchild and an only niece. I had no cousins or even a distant cousin. Sadly, the Dorenfield line ended with me. (Gosh, that just made me really sad to realize.) So here’s the thing. If your child/grandchild /niece was not only the miracle child but the last heir to the throne, wouldn’t you treat this girl like a fragile princess?
    If you wouldn’t, well, whatever, my family did.
    From birth to the age of twenty-five, I got everything I ever wanted (materially and, sure, yeah, lots of hugs and kisses). When I look back on my childhood, if there was a doll or a toy or some clothing I wanted, I got it. Not only was I the miracle child, but my father was the miracle real estate man. We were rich, no bones about it.
    There goes that question in my head again though: how much money makes you rich?
    Was I a happy kid? Let’s look at the evidence: I had a carnival at my fifth birthday, with a merry-go-round and a Ferris wheel. For my sixth birthday, fifty clowns came out of a tiny Volkswagen and then circled around me with balloons, presents, and cakes. (That actually scared the crap out of me. Errsshh . . . thinking about it still freaks me out.) On my seventh birthday, a helicopter picked up my parents and me, and we had lunch as we flew around Philadelphia. My eighth birthday was a trip to New York to the FAO Schwarz toy store. The store shut down just for me, and I had five minutes to pick out anything and everything I wanted. The first gift I picked was a life-size giraffe. My parents were laughing hysterically, watching little me trying to drag