Best Friends!!!

Luanne

17 hours ago

Once my memoir was published I felt free to think over my life again, mind unfettered by writing about it, and it occurred to me how important female friends have been to me.

I’m not one to generally enjoy hanging out with a group of women unless I am actual friends with each of them. Once there is anyone else in the (small) group who I don’t know it becomes more difficult for me. I’ve written before about being a Highly Sensitive Person. Maybe it’s just introversion. Or social anxiety. My ADHD. Or maybe I’m on the spectrum–there are certainly enough autism “tests” available online that would put me there. (Seriously, I think this is really unfair to people with real autism). Anyway, I prefer my friends one on one. That way I can focus on that person and not feel sidetracked and overstimulated by too much going on.

I had a best friend in first grade. Her name was Michelle, and we were both the best readers in our class. She was fun and smart and had an older sister so Michelle was a little old for her age. She even had a Chatty Cathy doll that talked. Or was it a Betsy Wetsy who wet her pants? We got split up in third grade, and I made two new friends, but I wasn’t close to them as I was to Michelle, whereas it appeared to me that Michelle went on to make lots of best friends in her class.

After we moved, I met Jill. We both loved to read mysteries and Gene Stratton Porter books which were wonderful for the approach to nature, but had some virulent racism in them. Nobody was monitoring our reading! We played in the woods and collected what we found. Jill not only was in my fourth grade class, but she was in my Sunday School class as well.

But then we moved again. The friend I met that first week in the new house was the girl next door. She is the first friend who shows up in Scrap. She is one of the only characters in the book where I changed her name and called her Ellen. The reason I did that is because Ellen died at age nineteen of ovarian cancer. Her stepbrother is also in the book, and he also died too young. I don’t know why I made this decision, but somehow I know it’s because of Ellen’s death. Although by the time she passed, we had already moved away again and had gone to different high schools. Ellen attended my wedding, but we were no longer close. I ended up seeing her a few weeks before she died, when she was looking for a suitcase to take back and forth to the hospital. Then I went to the visitation at the funeral home, a very distressing event.

Ellen’s sarcasm and sharp wit helped me get through some difficult 10-12 year old times with my father. She spoke up to my father, something he was not used to. And she was a bit of a wiseacre. But in the years we were apart, Ellen changed completely and became what I thought of at the time as a goody-goody, dressing very modestly (in the early 70s!), carrying a tiny mom-style purse on her forearm. But did this happen because of the cancer? I have her senior picture still, taken before she got sick. In it, she’s beautiful, her long brown hair thick and wavy, her eyes sparkling.

Best friends take on the world!

The next best friend that shows up in Scrap is Randi. We are still friends although we live in different states. Randi and I were in all our classes together all through junior high because our school was “tracked” and there was only one class of our track. Randi and I became inseparable and pulled off some pretty weird capers, even after I had moved to a different high school, such as secretly driving 150 miles away to see a boy I had a crush on who had moved. If my parents had known!!! But they didn’t. Randi was always there for any silliness I could concoct and always had my back. I couldn’t have gotten through those years without her.

All of my female friends have been important to my development as a person and also as a writer. They have been a saving grace of my life.

This leads me to this: I had a LOT of help writing this book. Any book that takes 18 years to come to fruition has either sat there doing nothing most of the time or has been kicked around and around and around. Scrap is the latter. So many people–friends and strangers–have had a hand in Scrap that when I thought of writing a thank you to go in the book, I had one panic attack after another. What if I forgot someone at the time I was writing it? After all, memories come to us in fits and starts. They don’t rest at the front of our minds all the time. Not enough room!

Finally, I decided to skip the public thank you because it was too overwhelming. But if you helped me with this book don’t think for one moment that I don’t think of you often and of the help you gave me.

And thank you if you read it recently or are reading it now. You can’t imagine how much it means to me to share this story that’s been brewing for many decades!!!