FRIENDS FOREVER

    

Friends Forever

THEN:


    My very first friend was a cousin named Becky. She was a year or so older than me, and was very sweet and pretty, perhaps too sweet and pretty, because I could not talk her into playing in the sand under my porch or riding her tricycle like a wild thing. She was much more interested in boring ol' baby dolls. I carried a couple of dolls around sometimes, but my dollies rode horses, or went to sea, or went on adventures with fairies. Her dollies laid there until she declared they were crying for a bottle. Becky would then "feed" them delightedly while I sat there wanting to chuck her dollies out the window. I was more into dirt and speed. She had a little sister named Ramona, but Ramona was like Becky's dolls; She laid there until she wanted a bottle and then she cried. I did not want to chuck Ramona out the window. She was fascinatingly alive and I had an intrinsic and deep respect for Life. Sometimes they let me hold my baby cousin on my lap while I sat very still. Ramona felt nice. She was warm, she smelled like milk, and was much too heavy to throw out a window anyway.

    Years later, my family moved to a mobile home. Our next door neighbors, Ruth and Dennis, had a son named Randal that was two years younger than me. Ran loved animals, dirt, and speed. It was a match made in Heaven and soon we were like the proverbial peas and carrots. He was the same age as Becky's little sister Ramona, whom I had not seen in a few years. When they came back to visit, I was delighted to find out that Ramona was a precocious kid now instead of a crying, heavy baby. When her family visited, we left Becky with the grown ups and her dolls while we climbed tress and waded in the creek. Becky left when their parents did, but Ramona often stayed and played with me. She liked to run and jump and was no stranger to dirt. My sister Lila was pregnant and was suffering from pica, though we did not know the name of her condition at the time. What we knew was that Lila craved ice and gave into those cravings. She ate it all day long. Lila and I were largely anemic and craving ice is a symptom of an iron deficiency. I did not crave it like she did, but I wanted to be like Lila so much that I insisted on eating it with her whenever she was around. While Ramona was there, she ate the ice too. Once, she was holding a cube of ice tight in her chubby little hand and water was dripping furiously from her fist.

    "Ramona?" I asked, "Why aren't you eating your ice? Don't you like it?"

    "I like it just fine," She told me in her little kid voice, "But it's too cold. I'm waiting for it to warm up."

    Ramona taught me to sing a jaunty little song that said, "Here comes (insert any name) floating down the Delaware, chewing on her underwear. Must have been a dirty pair. Ten days later, bitten by a polar bear, and that was the end of it!" We tormented everyone we could with that song and with "He's got the whole world in His hands," because we would sing that one using ever item we could see or think of, "He's got all the hound dogs/old trucks/rainbows/merry go 'rounds/etc in His hands." He really did have the whole world in His hands when we were through singing that song!

    Lila gave birth to my niece Tanya when I was seven and Ramona was five. Now a trio was born. It seemed like I turned around a few times and Tanya was up from infancy and following Ramona and me everywhere. Tanya and Ramona were my best and most constant childhood friends. Their faces were woven into so many of my favorite memories. Their best interest so quickly become more important to me than my own, along with Tanya's brother and two other sisters that were all younger than her. I adored them all, but only Tanya tagged after me, insisting that she be a deep part of the fabric in my quilt of my friendships. My sisters were ten and twelve years older than me, more like extra mothers in many ways. Becky preferred to play with other little girls that loved crying dollies and ruffled dresses. I moved away from Ran and hardly saw him afterwards. But Ramona and Tanya became my pseudo siblings. They filled so many of my days with joy and drove away the lonesome feelings I sometimes dealt with.

    In first grade, I became friends with Camillia Michelle Rose. She was a quite little dark haired child, as sweet as sugar. I loved her pretty name and her calm ways. At different times in our kidhood, she went by Michelle and by Camillia. I thought she could not lose as both the names were as sweet and pretty as she was.

    In second grade, Camillia was in another room, but we still played together at recess. I also played with Annette and Tauna (pronounced Tonya, just like my niece's name was pronounced.) And I played a lot with a distant cousin named Earl. Annette loved that she had the same name as my mother. She found a way to talk to my mom almost every time my parents came to pick me up. Tauna was quiet and willowy. Both girls were blond and very pretty. I remember running across the playground holding each of their hands and wondering why boys did not like each other well enough to hold hands. In second grade it was already frowned upon for males to show physical affection. Earl was not affectionate and he was far from quiet. He was obnoxious and loud, but I loved him very much.

    In the third grade, I met Jutannia and Angie and we became a common trio around the school. I played mostly with them but sometimes also with Rosalee and Betty. That year I learned the trick of keeping out of a fight that I should not be part of. Jutannia and Angie would get angry with each other and, for a while, they would both come to me and ask me to take their side. I don't know where I got the idea to refuse. Maybe I simply and honestly could not tell who was in the right, but I quickly made a habit of refusing to take sides. If they got obsessed with the argument, I would withdraw from both of them and hang out with Rosalee and Betty, or Camillia Michelle. If they were not being too crazy with their feud and they were nice to me I would play with whichever one asked me first, usually this was Jutannia as she seemed to value a friendship with me more than Angie did. But I loved it best when all three of us were friendly. Many times my insistence that I would not take a side and my encouragement that they get along brought about their happy reconciliation. And so it was that, quickly and at a very young age, I became a peacemaker.

    In fourth grade, I was all about Paul S. He was a farm boy and I was a farm girl. We lived too far apart to play together, but I watched him get off and on the bus every day and we often sat together. Our teacher seemed to hate both of us, but made the mistake of assigning our seats alphabetically. This put us together and near the back of the room. Paul and I huddled over comics and magazines and whispered about things we found more fascinating than our spelling words.

    In fifth grade I was back with Jutannia and Angie. We spent a lot of time trading white elephants, though we did not know then to call our trinkets that. To us, it was a game where we took anything we did not want anymore, or our family did not want anymore, and traded those items at school for something we wanted or imagined someone else might want. Or game became pretty serious to us. The trinkets were used as serious currency that might buy you extra french fries at lunch or an awesome new pencil. A few kids brought things their family most assuredly was not willing to trade away, and that became the end of the game. I would never have stolen anything from my family. If they wanted something, did not give me permission to trade it, I would not have dreamed of carting that something off. I was largely about gifts. Much of what I traded for was to make my family happy. I would not steal from them and make them unhappy. That was the opposite of what I hoped to do. Most notably I "bought" my mother a Christmas tree broach for Christmas. It was simple costume jewelry, silver, and had different colored faux jewels in it. One of them was missing, and I had this big idea that I could find another jewel to fit in the slot and glue it in there. That never happened, but my mother wore that costume jewelry with much pride and delight through several Christmas seasons anyway.

    In the second year of fifth grade (I failed that grade twice) I hung out with Jill, who was a very pretty curly haired girl with a lot of attitude. I loved how spunky she was. I also hung out just a little with Rose, a very poor girl that spoke with a deep country accent, and I made friends with a girl named Andrea. Andrea was also spunky and she had a great sense of humor. This is probably when I began to value friends that could make me laugh. My family finally had a telephone and Andrea was the first friend I spent time talking with on the phone. I knew where she lived. She and another nice girl named Debbie got off the bus near the second sharp bend coming up the Camp Creek road, about four or five miles from our home. I had watched her get on and off the bus many times. The fact that I could sit in my home and she could sit in her home and we could talk to each other and hear each other instantly fascinated me. I tried many times to get my sister Sandi, who I thought knew everything, to explain this magic to me, but either she did not understand it well herself or I could not follow her explanation. My home had no running water, but we had electricity and a telephone. We were almost normal in my book. We had a party line and Andrea and I used to drop silent whenever anyone picked up the phone and, without listening for a dial tone, began to dial. When they stopped dialing, Andrea would say, "Hello?" and try to pretend to be "Aunt Alice" or whomever the caller was asking for. She didn't get by with it for very long but it did not take much to greatly amuse us.

    The electric range in our kitchen, like most everything else, had been purchased second hand. It had a timer that no one could figure out how to turn off or reset. At random times during the day that timer would go off. It was much louder than you would ever expect an oven timer to be and, the only way to get it to stop buzzing, that we had chanced upon, was to jar it -- hard. This meant a lot of vibration. So, the timer would go off and everyone in the house would stand up, race to the kitchen, and begin jumping up and down. Being on the phone did not render you exempt from your stove jarring duties, so Andrea became accustomed to these interruptions. I don't know if it was due to frustration or simply because it was fun, but most of us would begin not only to jump but to yell. We turned into the Looney Tunes characters every time that timer buzzed.

    My mother would raise her voice to a higher pitch and start screaming something akin to, "Come on, you dad blamed stove! Shut the heck up! I'm trying to cook around here!" She often resorted to baby talk and that, coupled with the high pitch and her penchant for yellow, left me seeing her favorite Looney Tunes character, Tweety Bird hopping lightfootedly around the kitchen.

    Sandi would hop too, chiming in simultaneously with, "Pipe down you crazy hunk of metal before we take you to the junk yard and sell you for scrap iron!" She seemed more genuinely angry than Mother did and my mind's eye likened her to a frustrated Sylvester or sometimes Daffy Duck.

    Daddy would sometimes jump quietly and sometimes shout out a random song that had been hanging around in his head. He'd sing loudly, "Hey, good lookin'! Whatcha' got cookin' How's about cookin' something up with me?!"  His jumping was always joyful! 'Foghorn Leghorn, at your service' it seemed to say.

    My adopted uncle, Crit and my Uncle Junior would use mild swear words in their declarations of stove timer resistance. My mother would usually let the mild curse words slide without a dressing down. They would yell, "You *+^%#@ stove! Shut the *&&^$# up," while jumping mightily all over the kitchen. Crit with his shaggy hair and fierce but lovable scowl might as well be yelling, "Bracken Fracken!" He was Yosemite Sam in my eyes. Uncle Junior, thin, and lanky, and full of hard luck tales, could be Wile E. Coyote on a good day.

    I usually helped my daddy sing while I bounced, imagining myself as Witch Hazel or the Tazmanian Devil. Sometimes I was Speedy Gonzales yelling to the top of my lungs, "Arriba! Arriba! Andale! Andale!" Sometimes I was laughing too hard to shout anything at all.

    Usually the stove stopped buzzing and no one noticed because of the immense racket we were making. After the commotion calmed down, I would breathlessly pick the phone back up and Andrea would say, "Can I please trade families with you?"

    The other common interruption to our phone calls was when someone sneezed. My mother and both my sisters have always sneezed very loudly, unbelievably loudly. I grew up around them and was soon immune, but those sneezes startled other people a lot! Andrea made a game out of trying to guess who she heard sneezing in the background at my home. She was rarely ever correct, but she was dogged in her determination to identify my mother and sisters by their sneezes. I thought it was funny when she guessed wrong, and extra funny when she got the dogs and the humans mixed up. We had two Chihuahuas, Feisty and Pumpkin, that had barks much bigger than their bites. Sometimes one of them would yip a single sound or perhaps two in succession and Andrea would say, "Was that your mom sneezing that time?"

    On the road that traveled directly above our road we had some very good friends and fellow church members. Brother Manny Wayne and Sister Bea had two kids named David and Robin. I did not get to see them often, but I loved playing with them when I could. Robin was a pretty big tomboy, like me, and David loved motorcycles. I loved watching David love his motorcycles, but I never admitted that I had a crush on him. I was still very shy about boys at that time. On my twelfth birthday, Robin told me that my parents were buying me a rabbit from her mother. We were on the bus and the noise was drowning out part of what she was saying. "Don't tell them I told you though," She yelled my way, "It's supposed to be a secret." I got my hopes up for a beautiful rabbit for my birthday when in reality it was a rabbit cake. I had missed a crucial word in the secret. I had a large and beautiful Bugs Bunny cake that Sister Bea baked and decorated. I loved Bugs Bunny and that remains the prettiest cake I have ever had for any birthday.

    Once I switched schools Nancy and Michelle became my best school friends and I had found a new trio. One or the other of them was in my homeroom every year while I was at that school and we all three hung out together before and after classes, on the playground, at lunch, music, library, and gym. We were together at sock hops and any school functions that allowed just a little mingling. We mingled toward one another like magnets. Once high school reared its head, Nancy and I struggled to arrange our schedules to be together as much as possible. Pitifully, it turned out that Home Economics would be our only class together and I had no classes with Michelle. It helped that Nancy and I shared lockers, but I still missed her most of the rest of the day and this added to my high school blues. There were other friends that moved into and out of our happenings. I thought of them as our bigger group or "gang". They were Tammy, Rhonda, Shan, Stephanie, Jill, Brenda, Rita, Sherry, and April. All of us were friends but Nancy and Michelle were the ones I hung out with most often. As far as the guys went, Jimmy was my most constant guy friend, but I also loved to hang out with Buddy, with my cousin DeanO. In class, I spent a lot of time fighting the urge to whisper with the wonderfully sweet Stuart. Shane H. was the only guy I knew that I thought was as good, as kind, as loyal as Stuart. And there were two tough little guys named Joey B. and Clint R. that never failed to defend me if a bully was around. Possibly that was because I would tolerate no lip about either of them, but who knows which is the chicken and which is the egg? Though we did not hang out much, Joey, Clint and I shared a mutual respect that ran very deep.

    When I was in the sixth grade, I found Cindy D. and we spent many a fun hour together rocking the 80s. We had a lot in common and had similar tough spirits, though I did not know any of that when I first saw her on the bus, wearing a fancy rabbit coat and sporting perfect blond hair, her eyes sparkling like blue diamonds. It would have been easy to simply be envious. I am very glad I took the time to get to know the sweet, tough girl beneath the facade I saw as weak and spoiled.

    In eight grade, which was held in the high school, since I was not in as many classes with Nancy as I would have liked, I fell into a friendship with a girl named Dreama. I loved her name and she seemed so much older than most of the girls in my classes. She had a serious boyfriend that worked in the local garage, and she was about as disillusioned with school as I was. Dreama taught me the best and easiest ways to skip classes and how to shoplift much more, and much bigger items, than I had ever imagined. Once I realized I had to stop shoplifting, I found a way to hang out more with Nancy and less with people that encouraged the wild child under my skin. I had discovered that maybe you aren't what you eat, but if you aren't vigilant, you sure lean toward being a lot like whomever you hang out with. To this day though, I wish Dreama, and all my wonderful friends many blessings and fine things. I am grateful for all they taught me and all the fond memories they helped me make.