Friends Forever

Childhood friends and their impact on us as people can tell us a lot about our personalities and how we viewed the world back then. Those other lives that crossed ours at critical points in our development are often never forgotten.

Wendy was certainly one of a kind, and that is an understatement. I started hanging around with her in fourth grade. She was half Polish and half native American and her jet black, straight hair was bunched into two ponytails on either side of her head. They had a habit of sticking out. Her thick bangs always hung in her eyes so she tended to squint which gave her a perpetual scowling appearance. She had a husky voice and a laugh that was so big it rocked the classroom. Wendy lived in a ramshackle house a few blocks from where I lived. Her clothes were not very nice, and her knee socks always had sagging elastic, which meant they were always falling down. I adored her. I think it was because she was completely fearless and didn’t seem to care what anyone thought of her that I liked her so much. By contrast, I was always worried and fussing about my clothes and whether my hair was right and whether I was considered pretty or not. Along came Wendy who tackled life head-on with that enormous laugh and electric pony tails that stuck out and sagging socks and showed me that life was more than worrying about one’s looks. Wendy was, in a word, hilarious. Her jokes, to my fourth grade mind, were unparalleled in wit. We would walk home from school shrieking with laughter, once so overcome with mirth that we ended up in piles of autumn leaves in someone’s yard. She didn’t put up with bullying and when provoked, Wendy was fierce. Nobody picked on her or me because they didn’t want to be body slammed against the playground fence. She was tough, Wendy was.

I went to her home once and was secretly horrified at the squalor. It made me respect Wendy even more, because she never seemed to let it get to her or to mind it. We joined Pioneer Girls together and drove my mother crazy in the back seat of the car with our snickering and guffawing. Sadly, we lost track of each other when we left for junior high, but I still wonder what became of her. I will never forget that fearless, spunky girl with a one-of-a-kind laugh.

In junior high, there was Gina. Gina had parents with big Harley motorcycles so the first time I saw her in 7th grade, she was coming down the hall wearing a leather Harley jacket. She grinned at me, and that was the start of it. For some unaccountable reason, she called me “Bub”. Within days we were eating lunch together in the cafeteria, and I discovered that here was another one with a great sense of humor. Not only were her dry jokes funny, but she could draw caricatures of people. This led to hours of drawing between us and the creation of a contraband catalog of teacher caricatures.(That catalog was a hot property at school until it was confiscated one bleak day.)

Sleepovers at Gina’s were always memorable. She was an only child so her mother must have tolerated the high spirits more than most would have. Gina invented something called the Fried-Egg dance which involved complicated aerobic maneuvers and then, at a critical juncture, a leap off her bed and crash landing on the floor. My mother would have been horrified if she had seen me engaged in this particular sport, and I, as a mother, would be incensed if one of my children were found leaping from furniture at someone’s home. What mothers do not know…

Gina would petrify me by catching enormous frogs from her pond and sticking them in my face when I went to her house. My revulsion at those things only spurred her on to find other bigger ones. That’s what friends are for in junior high. We stayed awake and planned practical jokes for school until late into the night. I was never the perpetrator, merely the encourager. I recall that one involved the passing out of trick candy containing garlic at the center. That one went down in math class, and poor Mrs. Paape watched in bewilderment as a girl went running out of the classroom gagging loudly while the scent of garlic filled the room. It was terrible, really. Once again, it was Gina’s fearlessness that attracted me. She had no hang-ups socially, and I thought that was the best trait to have in the whole world. The relationship toned down a notch after a certain 8th grade parent/teacher meeting.

At 18, I ended up making friends with two girls whose names were very similar. I called them M & M. We thought it was cool to sit in the lounge on our breaks and shoot the breeze. M & M came from wealthy backgrounds, drove new cars, and were spending their college freshman year living it up. Both had many of the same traits as my earlier friends, but it really wasn’t so funny anymore. A healthy respect for authority and rules is a great protection. Confidence is one thing, but arrogance and rule breaking is another. M & M’s brand of fearlessness involved cooking up amazingly authentic looking fake ID’s to get into bars on the weekends, breaking into campus buildings for the fun of it, and pulling pranks, one of which involved a campus priest. I won’t get into that one. Those two were constantly coming up with new recreational ideas for us to try, a lot of them risky. There is a biblical Proverb that warns about being a companion of fools for good reason. The fool part tends to be catching.

I’ve analyzed why certain kids are attracted to others who may be polar opposites. I think I saw in all these girls a confidence that I lacked. With them, I felt strong and confident, too. But getting your confidence from others is always a dangerous proposition. I lacked the desire to chart my own course and in a year or two, the cost of that was to be exponentially higher. Looking back, I wonder about my own lack of asserting who I was. Why did I play the buffoon when I knew better? I had been Salutatorian in high school and had godly parents, but in my first year out of high school, you wouldn’t have known it. Hindsight as an adult makes for all kinds of brilliant analysis of why we do certain things when we were younger. You can’t put an adult head on the shoulders of an 18-year-old. All we can do is let our mistakes serve as cautionary examples for our own children and let them know that our decisions when we are young matter a whole lot.

The memory of our friends from childhood stay with us for the rest of our lives. For good or not so good, they had an influence on us and became part of the fabric of who we are. I came across a photo of Gina the other day while sorting old pictures, and I had to smile remembering that day in 7th grade when I heard her say, “Hey, Bub!” I turned around to find the most ghastly bullfrog staring me in the face. Frozen in time, that memory will be forever Gina!

Today, I have friends I value a great deal. I have several godly women friends who are older than me who are priceless examples. Some are moms who are slogging through the trenches of parenthood and they understand the current challenges. Fellow Christians in ministry are also a vast encouragement because they understand the challenges of the work I do, and sometimes you need the advice and counsel of those who know that we are all too human while trying to serve the Lord online or on radio. I thank God for all of them. When I make friends, I want it to last forever. Sometimes it doesn’t always work that way, but I wish it would because I value each one of them who has crossed my path.