About
Copyright © 2010 Andrea Langworthy
Any copying, redistribution or retransmission
of any of the contents of this service without
the express written consent of Andrea Langworthy
is expressly prohibited
When the family newsletter questionnaire arrived via email, I was tickled with the theme — best friends. For this edition, tied into Best Friend’s Day on August 15th, my cousin asked the older generation, of which I am a member, to tell the others about a best friend from childhood. My best friend was Gretchen. The youngest of six children, Gretchen spent so much time at our house that my mother said she was like a member of the family and should just move in. Sadly, when Gretchen switched to a fancy all-girls’ collegiate prep school in seventh grade, she was too busy with her new buddies to hang around with me. But that was all right because half a year later, my family moved to the opposite side of Minneapolis and I, too, made new pals. Still, I always wondered what happened to Gretchen.
Fifteen years later, as I waited my turn at the post office in the small New Jersey town where my husband and I had moved, I found out. When the woman at the front of the line finished her transaction, I was surprised to see a familiar, but older, face; Gretchen’s sister had moved to New Jersey, also. We exclaimed over the fact that we ended up on the same street. “Small world,” we agreed. She filled me in on my girlhood friend: college out East was followed by marriage and children. But that was nearly 40 years ago and every once in awhile, I still wonder what happened to my sidekick.
Answering the questions for the family newsletter brought new queries to mind: Does Gretchen ever think about the day we had to sit under our kindergarten teacher’s desk as punishment because on the way to school we’d entertained fellow bus riders with howling sounds like the ones Gretchen’s dog, Herman, made? Does she remember her Dachshund sitting on a stool between us at the corner drug store as he shared Gretchen’s ice cream? Or that he snuck into the fenced area my dad had made for my Easter ducklings and made us all cry? On Halloween, did she tell her children about the ghoulish site we created for the neighborhood kids in the crawl space under her family’s house? About the peeled grapes for eyeballs and left-over spaghetti we used for brains.
Those were the days when, after school and during the summer, kids could roam freely through their neighborhood and all their parents cared about was that they were in the home for dinner. Gretchen and I took our time walking the half-mile to ballet class every week. If the spirit moved us, we got up early on Saturday mornings and walked to church for Mass, stopping at the bakery on the way back. I wonder if my grade school friend has forgotten those soft, sticky, sugar-raised donuts and her freckle-faced friend. The one she vowed to be friends with forever and then, sealed the pact with blood. Maybe she has but I never will.