The second Featured Grownups topic for this month is Friendship.
Here is my story.
One of my very best friends ever is a Xangan, and though I could write volumes about our friendship and how much it means to me (when I first started this project, she is exactly who I was going to write about), a name popped into my mind as I was writing, and I decided to write about a childhood friend, instead.
When I was in the fourth grade, I was a shy gangly kid rapidly becoming one of the most unpopular kids in school. At the time I didn’t realize how important hygiene was nor did I learn from my parents. We took a bath once a week whether we needed it or not. My dad worked days (left the house at 5:30 am) and my mom worked nights (got home at 3:00 am so was never up to help us get ready for school.) Half the time, not only was I not wearing clean clothes, but I also wore shoes without socks (even in the dead of winter), didn’t brush my hair and didn’t own a toothbrush (not surprisingly, both parents had full dentures.)
Sheri was a new kid. She was gangly like me, only taller. She had reddish brown hair that was kind of mousy and was covered in freckles, and crooked teeth. We sort of gravitated toward each other, because we were both outcasts. We didn’t hang out together after school, because Sheri lived in a different neighborhood. But we remained friends.
In seventh grade, we hung out together at lunch time and started visiting each other’s houses. She had an older sister who was in our grade because she had been held back in fifth grade. Her older sister was always mean to me, but Sheri was always sweet. In retrospect, I didn’t deserve her friendship. But I digress.
So in 7th grade, Sheri and I took over playing records in the gym during lunch and we would dance in the gym – doing all the line dances that were popular back then (even in the late 60s we had a version of the “hustle” aka “electric slide” aka a dozen or so other incarnations.) We thought we were so cool doing all the line dances (both of us oblivious to the fact that all the popular kids sitting in the stands were laughing at us and making fun of us.)
In the 8th grade, we were in chorus together. We both loved to sing, but Sheri was less shy about it than I was. Everyone in chorus was required to do something for the talent show, so Sheri and I and one other girl (someone even shyer than I was) decided to sing a song together. Evidently it sounded horrible because people came up to us afterward and asked us what we were singing and that they could only hear Sheri and that the words were muffled and they couldn’t understand anything we sang.
9th grade. The year I decided to stop being shy, to stop caring what other people thought of me, and to become my own person. Of course, I also became what I hated most in other people. A snob. I wouldn’t hang out with anyone who wasn’t “cool”. And Sheri wasn’t cool. I hung out with the cool crowd, but didn’t realize I was just an outsider looking in. Even though they let me tag along at lunch with them, they never called me (or even asked for my phone number) or invited me to visit. That was also the year that my friend Jan and I, whom I’d had a love/hate relationship with (I worshipped the ground she walked on and she treated me like yesterday’s garbage one day and like I was her best friend the next.) We used to write notes to each other and jokingly call each other honey bunch, sweetie pie, etc. Someone found a note I wrote her and suddenly the rumor that we were lesbians spread like wildfire. (This, BTW, has nothing to do with Sheri – but just to let you know what was going on with me once I’d turned my back on her because I didn’t think she was cool enough.)
I don’t remember writing this, but Sheri brought yearbooks to one of our class reunions and I wrote in her yearbook something along the lines of “Some day you’ll become cool. Until then, good luck with the boys. You’ll need it.” When I read that, I was shocked. I looked Sheri in the eye and said “How could you have EVER talked to me again after that????” (To this day, just thinking about how unconditional her feelings of friendship for me were brings tears to my eyes when I consider how much I abused that friendship.)
In high school we became friendly again. I visited her house a lot, I think she visited me a couple of times. We were in chorus together and hung out a little bit together. I avoided her older sister because she was still nasty to me (until she quit school).
In our senior yearbook (that Sheri also brought to the reunion) I redeemed myself because I wrote in her yearbook how much I treasure her as a friend and that through good and bad, thick and thin, she has been there for me since we first met in the fourth grade. (I had forgotten I had written that, too.)
I didn’t see Sheri again until our 20-year class reunion. After high school she ended up married right away and starting a family. Even though I had this misconception that she wasn’t one of the “cool” kids, she always had a boyfriend and a date, and I remained boyfriend-less and dateless (a lot of it was because I had a crush on someone all through high school and snubbed and/or ignored all the rest of the guys. I learned later from several that they wanted to ask me out but they thought I was stuck up because I wouldn’t talk to them.)
But I digress, again.
I was happy to see Sheri at our 20-year reunion. She was still the same as she was in high school, except with shorter hair. Still, though, we didn’t exchange contact information.
A couple years later, I joined classmates.com (when it was part of Delphi) and became the assistant host for our school’s forum. Sheri joined and we exchanged email addresses and started writing to each other. She still lived in the town where we grew up, and I had since moved to a Chicago suburb. I was going to be meeting some friends in Windsor, with a stop in my hometown, and Sheri and I decided to get together for karaoke. I hadn’t done karaoke since the late 80s. We met up and had a great time together.
Ever since then, we’ve been able to get together on nearly every visit I make to my home town, usually for karaoke. She has also, with her husband, come to visit us in Chicago several times.
This is a friendship that has stood the test of time (we met 45 years ago), has weathered the ups and downs, and has proven to be one of my most treasured friendships ever. If there is anything I could go back and change, it would be my callousness toward Sheri in junior high school. GAWD I thought I was hot stuff then (and little did I know that people were laughing behind my back.) Had I not snubbed her the way I did, we probably would have had a lot more memories to share. But now I treasure what we do have.
Edited to add this photo taken last summer:
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