Friendship

"Laura said to me, ‘I’ll be your best friend.’ And that was that. And here we are, now both 58."

Today is Laura’s birthday. She is 58. Yesterday was Katie’s. She is 59. They are my best friends from high school.

We’ve been texting in a flood of conversation. Today, we are texting about a girl we all knew back in those days. A mean girl. A rich girl. The head of the 7^th grade clique I somehow ended up in as the new girl from Minnesota who happened to live down the block. I’m pretty sure her mother forced her to befriend me when our family moved down the street that summer before 7^th grade. We would walk to junior high together each morning. She had drawers and drawers of beautiful angora faire isle sweaters. All the rage in the early 80’s. She was obviously the queen of junior high. I was a 12 year old from Minnesota who had long straight hair I wore in two braids. I didn’t wear a bra yet. I was afraid to, so I hid my body in an oversized orange sweatshirt with the Wheaties logo on it. I was into drawing and playing piano and reading Nancy Drew mysteries. Jane (I’m giving her a pseudonym) and her gang swore like sailors, went to NYC from time to time to Macy’s to buy LeSportsSac bags, had a serious collection of Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers, and wore bras. I was a tomboy. They were boy crazy. Jane’s older sister was the cool girl a few years ahead of us and was friends with the cheerleader group (her sister was too cool to even be a cheerleader). They made out with the football players and drank out of flasks behind the bleachers at the football games.

I was out of my league from the get.

One of Jane’s friends, T, was very busty and who was most definitely not from the rich side of town, but had that kind of spacy, disaffected bitchy cool that made her important to Jane. Jane’s all need a middle class sidekick, I’ve learned. The Beta to her Alpha. T was mean to me. I was the tagalong with the out of touch hair, baggy clothes, not an inch of cool. T one day told me, “What you need is a best friend,” with a subtext of “find another group.”

Standing next to me was Laura. She was in my class but was from a different elementary school than Jane and T. Most of her classmates went to a different junior high and I think she was a bit lost. She was taller than me, formidable, with a huge head of red curly hair and a big smile. A real tough girl attitude that wasn’t put on like a costume. Street smarts earned. Hearing T, Laura said to me, ‘I’ll be your best friend.’ And that was that. And here we are, now both 58.

Laura is funny. World class funny. No bullshit. Didn’t give a shit what anyone thought of her funny. She was smart and everyone liked her (or they were afraid of her). Either way, she was my great protector. One day Vivian Sigh–a very tall, very large girl in our class who was from the projects and hated the ‘rich girls’–threatened to beat me up (Vivian Sigh was always beating someone up) in the locker room one afternoon and I, stupidly, goaded her on. Then Vivian Sigh threw a punch at me, it was Laura who pushed me away and took the punch.

Laura moved away during high school. Before she did, we befriended Katie, who was a year ahead of us. We met her in marching band. Laura played flute. I played tenor saxophone. Katie was a flag bearer. We were all super band geeks. You have to know that in our high school, marching band was a cult. It was huge, over 200 of us, we spent a week at band camp drilling the routines that cost over $25K to create, and we practiced all the time for competitions. We were Atlantic Coast champions for 4 years in a row. We marched in the Macy’s Parade. It was a big deal and it took over our lives and I loved every minute of it. The three of us were a gang. Katie was a bit of a tomboy too. Quiet, but not reticent. Driest sense of humor I’ve ever known. Also, not a lick of bullshit. When Laura left, KT was my ride or die.

My parents joined the Grampian Hills tennis pool club when we arrived in Williamsport. There was a country club but it was mostly golf and my father was a huge tennis player. Turns out the Grampian club had originally been mostly Jewish because they quietly didn’t allow Jewish people at The Country Club. Of course, Jane’s family were Country Club people. Objectively speaking, we were privileged, like Jane, just on a lower run of the wealth scale. Jane came from generational wealth in a small, small town. My father had clawed his way out of poverty to a solid upper middle class living by that point. I did not want for anything growing up, but I did not grow up experiencing myself at all as ‘rich.’ My father didn’t walk through the world as a wealthy man. He walked through the world as a man who worked very hard and was still working very hard. Nobody handed anything to my Dad. He grew up on a small farm without electricity for a long time. He put himself through college, having to take time off to work to make enough to go back for a semester. While Jane and her country club friends were bound for private expensive prep schools, I knew I was a public school kid.

Original Ride or Die, Lee, my sister

That’s why I loved The Grampian club. The kids I met there, for the most part, were like me. Unassuming. I met Terry there. He became one of my best friends and his parents were my parents’ best friends. Terry, Laura and Katie and I were a gang in the summer and then we were a gang during the school year, even though Terry went to the Catholic school in town. Bill joined us, and, even though Bill’s family was THE old money family in town, Bill and his sister were really down to earth. Bill went away to prep school but joined us on holidays and summers. Somehow Greg from the south side of town (a different high school too) joined us and filled out the gang. In the end, none of them were in my graduating class. But those were my friends on college breaks, in the summer, through life.

We’ve all lost parents. We are all in our late 50’s. My parents moved away from Williamsport many years ago, so I have no reason to go there anymore. Bill still lives in town, going back after many years in business to restart his life as a teacher. He lives in the house he grew up in, the house with the pool that we’d all sneak into late at night to drink wine coolers and splash around. The four of us haven’t been in the same place since I don’t know when. Maybe college?

Once, during college, I was at a party, probably at Bill’s house, around the pool. Jane’s father made a lewd comment to me, something like, “you’re hot.” Typical. I understand a bit more about her family in hindsight and I’m pretty sure the girl was just hanging on for dear life throughout her childhood.

I’ve been thinking about friendships and how hard it is to make new friends in our 50’s. Usually, people’s friends come from their kids’ parents. But I am an older parent, and any mother of an 8 year old is mostly young enough to be my own kid. I don’t have a regular schedule. I’m a writer and a touring musician and a full time/part time mom. It’s like dating. I can’t date. I have Wednesdays free. And I’m too old and tired to do the dating dance of flirting and coffees. I just want someone who likes to watch British procedural dramas on Netflix and cook healthy food and eat brownies. On Wednesdays. But not stay over. I like my mornings alone.

It’s rare when I meet another woman who runs at my speed. And when I do, it’s like a gift from the universe. I’ve recently met a few and the relief of meeting a new friend at this age is incredible. It’s a better rush than falling into deep like with a dude. At least for me. Because I can text the new friend about poetry and shoe shopping and they get me. And I don’t have to worry if my arms are a bit flappy.

Back then, in the junior high school days, I felt so awkward, like everyone else had the playbook for social cues and I missed it. I was in the cool group but I was bullied by the cool group. Maybe just because I showed weakness and insecurity. Because I felt like I needed to fit in and couldn’t afford LeSportsSac handbags from Macy’s and didn’t want to drink because I knew I’d get punished.

Or, maybe I did know myself. I knew I liked to sit in the attic where I’d set up my easel and draw for hours, even if it was hot and stinky and full of cobwebs. It felt like the ideal artist’s garret. I knew I loved to light candles around the piano and hover my hands over the keys hoping my Catholic God would gift me the songwriter gene (he didn’t until I was in my mid-20s). I wasn’t friends with T or Jane in high school. In my own class, I hung out with the honors class kids. But they had their own cool set and I didn’t quite fit into that one either. There was a choir group. I didn’t feel like I fit into them either.

Jill and Sarah, College Ride or Die’s

I was ambitious and, once I discovered I could sing and act, I was very serious about music. I trained with a private voice teacher and went to a summer arts program that was very competitive. I got the solos and the leads. I was very single minded. I was smart and got good grades. But I also skipped 40% of my senior year and still graduated in the top 20 of over 600. And I was resented for that (one girl actually said something to me about it and I acted like I gave no shits about what people thought about me, although I very much did). Looking back, I was depressed. Probably had clinical depression since I was a kid. But it was the 80s and nobody talked about that stuff.

Maybe I’ve always chosen to go my own way, which can be a lonely ride. A misunderstood one, too. I am single-minded. I knew from an early age I wanted to live in Greenwich Village and be “an artist.” I didn’t actually know what that meant, it could be a poet a singer an actor, but it meant something more colorful than where I lived. And so in college, I gathered interesting people around me. Some, I can see in hindsight, were fabulous liars and created personas around them to probably hide from deeply traumatic childhoods. No matter, they were interesting. In acting school in NYC in the early 90’s, I was surrounded by them. It’s like we all moved to Manhattan from our small towns to find each other and to me it was the dream.

And now, in my late 50’s, as a mother, without any other mothers around me that are my age, I love to find other mother/artists who are singular and iconoclastic. A bit edgy. Maybe like me, with few close friends. I am finding mentors, women a bit older than me who have done something amazing with their lives, women I can learn from. I am finding women younger than me who look to me for advice and guidance and I give freely (sometimes I charge money).

But most importantly, I keep Katie and Laura very close at hand. To remind me not to believe my press. To remind me that I wore an oversized Wheaties sweatshirt for too long to hide from having to wear a bra until the last minute. I have a friend, Danny Schmidt, who wrote a beautiful song called “Company of Friends.”

When I die, let them judge me by my company of friends
Let them know me as the footprints that I left upon the sand
Let them laugh for all the laughter
Let them cry for laughter’s end
But when I die, let them judge me by my company of friends.

Or, as Henry V states, “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

I keep a small band. But I keep them close. And I’m fiercely loyal once you’re in my orbit. Ride or Die, as my one of my new friends says. You’d better be working on not giving a shit what others think of you (a lifelong journey). You’d better be honest and vulnerable. You’d better be very funny. And you’d better have a good shoe game.

Mostly, if Vivian Sigh should come back to beat you up and Bunky Johnson isn’t there to protect us (as he always was), this time, I promise I’ll take the punch.

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Amy Speace is an award-winning Americana folk singer and songwriter discovered by Judy Collins. Her songs have been recorded by Ms. Collins and many others and she has won International Song of the Year from the Americana Music Association (UK). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Working Mother, and Salon.com. She received her MFA from Spalding University and teaches English at Cumberland University. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee, with her son, Huckleberry, and her dog, Dusty Springfield.

The Cardinals, coming Sept 1st with Red Hen Press , is her debut poetry collection.