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Friends Forever

Childhood friends and their impact on us as people can tell us a lot about our personalities and how we viewed the world back then. Those other lives that crossed ours at critical points in our development are often never forgotten.

Wendy was certainly one of a kind, and that is an understatement. I started hanging around with her in fourth grade. She was half Polish and half native American and her jet black, straight hair was bunched into two ponytails on either side of her head. They had a habit of sticking out. Her thick bangs always hung in her eyes so she tended to squint which gave her a perpetual scowling appearance. She had a husky voice and a laugh that was so big it rocked the classroom. Wendy lived in a ramshackle house a few blocks from where I lived. Her clothes were not very nice, and her knee socks always had sagging elastic, which meant they were always falling down. I adored her. I think it was because she was completely fearless and didn’t seem to care what anyone thought of her that I liked her so much. By contrast, I was always worried and fussing about my clothes and whether my hair was right and whether I was considered pretty or not. Along came Wendy who tackled life head-on with that enormous laugh and electric pony tails that stuck out and sagging socks and showed me that life was more than worrying about one’s looks. Wendy was, in a word, hilarious. Her jokes, to my fourth grade mind, were unparalleled in wit. We would walk home from school shrieking with laughter, once so overcome with mirth that we ended up in piles of autumn leaves in someone’s yard. She didn’t put up with bullying and when provoked, Wendy was fierce. Nobody picked on her or me because they didn’t want to be body slammed against the playground fence. She was tough, Wendy was.

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