Best Friends

Today, I am meeting my friend Dianne for lunch.  She and I have been friends since we were 16 years old.  We knew each other in jr. high school but didn't really bond as good friends until we were in the same Home Economics class when we were in 11th grade.  We sat at a large, rectangle table with 4 other girls while Miss Jennsis, a 70-something spinster taught us the fundamentals of cooking, sewing, and balancing a check book.  There was a lot of 'lab' work where we were up mixing recipes or at sewing machines working on some stylish creation. While we were waiting our turn, Dianne and I used that time to talk.  We found out that we shared a love for writing.  She started bringing in short stories she had written for me to read and I gave her a few of mine to look at.  Our styles were so similar that we decided to co-author one.  She started writing in a spiral notebook.  I think she wrote a 6 or 7 page first chapter and then handed it off to me.  I read her work and then added my 6 or 7 page addition.  This went on for the remainder of the school year and until we had over 500 pages of handwritten and typed pages that filled a box that would hold a dress coat if you were wrapping it for a Christmas gift. 

She would come to my house after school and we would go in my room, close the door and sit on the floor going over ideas for new characters who were modeled after people we either loved or hated from school.  Sometimes we would add a celebrity in disguise and create some major drama that they would have to work their way in and out of with the help our our main characters, Christy and Kelly.  We would laugh until we cried at some of our scenarios.  The more outrageous the better chance these ideas had of being included in the story line.  We laugh, today, saying our characters foretold of punk rockers and the Gothic movements. We were SO ahead of our time.  LOL

That year of writing was the most fun and the best therapy I could have had in high school.  It gave me a safe place to vent all of my fears, insecurity, hostilities, and anger about being a teenager that just didn't fit in with the crowd.  It gave me a voice I didn't have in any other place.  I was terribly introverted and, now I see, depressed.  I didn't trust many people but I knew I could trust Dianne and she knew she could trust me.

We didn't know until years later that we were both the children of alcoholic fathers and that there was a lot of anger and tension in our homes growing up.  We talked about how strict our dads were and that they were 'mean' but we never addressed the alcohol issues until we were adults.  Now we look at the close friends we had and all of us were suffering thru some kind of disfunction at home.  One of our friends had a step-father that was molesting her sisters.  Another had her abusive father die of a heart attack when she was 13 and was being raised by an extremely strict, much older mother who used Hell and damnation to rule the home.  Another had a dad who was a womanizer.  I could go on and on.  The thing was, we were all close, caring of each other, supportive BUT never spoke of the things that were going on at home until we grew up and had families of our own.

Dianne and I have gone through a lot together in the nearly 40 years of friendship.  There have been times we haven't seen each other for long periods of time but each time we have come back together it's like no time has passed.  We just pick up where we left off.  I can tell her ANYTHING and she can tell me ANYTHING.  We accept each other's positive and negitive traits.  I am so lucky to have a friend like her.  I don't have a lot of what I call close friends.  Maybe 8 women that I really hold close to me and of those 8, only 3 (including Dianne) who I would trust with everything.  I have a lot of other women in my life that are fun to be around and who I enjoy seeing but who I wouldn't share the intimate details of my life with.  I've been burned a lot by people, especially other women, and it's not easy for me to trust.  This is why Dianne is like a jewel to me.  If you are lucky enough to have a friend like her, you are truly blessed!