I've been thinking about going home (shocker!), and I asked myself, Jess, of all your contacts from high school, who are the ones you most want to re-connect with?
And I came up with the strangest of answers. Sue K, who was sort of a friend of mine during high school, but mostly she was the mother a of weird friend of mine - the friendship was weird, not the friend - although come to think of it, the friend was plenty weird too. It was one of those friendships where either I was one of his best friends or else barely a blip on his radar screen - I never could tell which one (this is consistently my blindspot, and even hindsight doesn't help me sort it out all that much). He called me pretty much every day, right after the Simpson's, and we'd hang out sometimes, but in large groups there was just this tacit understanding that we'd go our separate ways. I always thought I was just not cool enough for him to "admit" to our friendship in public, but actually he was probably just really insecure. Heh.
But his mom was the coolest of cool. She allowed us kids just the right balance of freedom and boundaries, was the source of endlessly cool conversations, and got me into rollerblading. She was an amazingly fast runner (the whole family was - Trav captained the track team at his Ivy-League college, and sister Jena plays on the national women's soccer team, last I heard), and I rollerbladed alongside her on her long training runs for her first marathon - at age 40-something! My senior year, I was her student aide for 8th grade English and we had a blast. She was sort of my role model for being a cool grown-up.
After we left for college I got an 8-page, impassioned, handwritten letter from Travis about how he'd taken me for granted for so long and how I was a wonderful friend and what would he ever have done without me and so forth and... well, too little, too late.
So my friendship with Sue drifted off too. That, I find unfortunate. I'm content to let her son remain safely imbedded in my past, but I sure hope she returns my e-mail.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Sue
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2 comments:
I had a weird frienship like that, too, but in my case, I knew exactly where I stood. Cheryl was my next-door neighbor from when we were 5 until we were 13. Outside of school and all summer long, we played together pretty much every day and were sort of friends, but we had to ignore each other at school. She told me early on that I had to pretend not to know her at school and around her other friends. The adult me would have told her where to go and how to get there, but, oddly enough, the child me didn't really mind.
And I was really close some of my friends' parents as well. When I broke up with my high school boyfriend of two years, I was sadder about ending my relationship with his parents than ending things with him!
I'm glad you're back blogging, I missed your writing.
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