Yesterday was my friend Amy’s birthday. Happy 27 years old, Ames! Of course, as I called her at 11:00pm her time last night, I was staring at the card I had bought her, having meant to send it Friday afternoon. As is my wont, I called her and told her about it instead.
We had a nice, if brief (you know, because it was 11:00 on a school night and she actually works at a school) talk. As I do with many of my friends whom I’ve known since we were in training bras, so to speak, I did a version of the oh-my-goodness-can-you-believe-we’re-twenty-seven-I-remember-when-we-were-in-high-school-and-so-forth thing. Always cliched, yet always somehow really surprising.
Because, you know, I do remember. Quite well, as a twenty-seven-year-old’s reminiscences aren’t that inaccesible, brain cell wise. So, you want to know how I know Amy? Huh? Huh?
Well, she grew up down the street from me, of course. Now, I have a group of friends that call themselves and are called by others the Key Girls, about whom I will no doubt write in this journal at some unforeseen but probably pretty soon time. Amy knows and loves these girls too, but since she didn’t go to high school with us, she was in a slightly different friend category.
And you know how those go, right? By high school you’ve already got your various Friend Worlds, and for some people (me included), your worst social nightmare is What Happens If You Mix The Worlds? Like what happens if a friend from church youth group comes to one of your drama club plays, will the world spin off its axis? Yes, probably. This doesn’t usually have so much to do with the friends themselves, exactly…it has more to do with the feeling that only you can succesfully navigate the waters of the various Friend Worlds, and only you know how to be with each friend, and if they are around each other, well, who knows what will happen? This is all the more terrifying if, like me, you have a penchant for “embroidering” (i.e. lying your head off, either to make yourself sound more interesting or because nothing happens to you in real life that is as interesting as the stories you tell in your head. Some call this psychopathology, but I call it imagination). You have to keep up the various lies and that can get real exhausting real fast.
Anyway, so Amy didn’t go to Snooty Prep School but instead went to a regular high school where you were allowed to wear jeans. In passing, let me just note that when I went to college, the first couple of weeks of wearing jeans to class was just so excting to me. I don’t drink or smoke or nothin’ (why yes, I am a Goody Two Shoes!) and so this was like a little rebellion for me. At Amy’s school they couldn’t wear shorts, oddly enough in Miami, but they got to wear jeans.
Amy was also in the school band, and so through her I got to know all her band geek friends. Now, folks, let me tell you something. Band is geeky. I think that’s been established, and I think that’s just great. But let’s all pause for a minute and think about the band geek’s friend who goes to the high school football games of a school not her own so she can hang out with the band, and go to the band party later. That’s right, friends, you all need to bow down before my deeply humiliating high school social life.
But of course I had fun, even though I didn’t play a sousaphone or whatever. Interestingly enough, this pattern was repeated when I went to college, one of five all across the street from one another, and fell in this time, not with a bunch of band geeks, but with a bunch of just regular geeks, like physicists and engineers and stuff. I date one to this day.
But anyway, Amy. My friend from a slightly different Friend World. I spent every Friday night at her house for about two years. Ten years ago she had this Rockin’ Party wherein the boy I liked at the time’s band played in the backyard. It was just the coolest, and I remember waiting and waiting for her to turn seventeen because I could finally use the title from the magazine in the Annual Birthday Collage I made her every year. It was a really good one, by the way. I laminated it and everything.
Other stuff I did with Amy includes having my first (just absolutely horrid) real kiss on her couch and then telling her about it at the Venetian Pool the next day; driving around Key Biscayne (where we grew up) to look at the fancy houses; driving by the aforementioned Boy In A Band’s house and honking;doing thousands upon thousands of errands together; annotating that Two Million Things To Be Happy About or whatever book; going to California on a graduation trip (by ourselves!); acting as a therapist to every single boy who liked her; going to South Beach so she could get her bellybutton pierced; making up a Particle Man dance that could only be danced in the car; making up many more dances that could only be danced in the car to many other songs (including that horrible Led Zeppelin song which we mispronounced, hilariously, as Olive My Love) reading many many teen romances; learning about that crazy email thing so we could write each other in college. Amy was the first of my friends to get married and I was her maid of honor. During the wedding ceremony I told her jokes so she wouldn’t cry throughout the entire thing. During the reception, when everyone did the dingdingdingdingding! thing and the bride and groom have to kiss? One of those times she turned to me and gave me a kiss instead! Isn’t that great?
So even though she didn’t go to my school, I did high school with Amy. Since her parents moved away from where we grew up we haven’t seen each other very much. She came out to Seattle two summers ago, and I saw her last summer at another friend’s wedding, but that’s about it. Last night on the phone she said that she’d read this journal and was struck by how different our lives are. That’s maybe true. But when she was in Miami for this wedding, she stayed at my house after the rehearsal dinner, and we stayed up late talking and talking and talking, just like you’d expect. Is it a cliche to say that you know who your real friends are because you can just fall back into your friendship no matter how long it’s been since you’ve seen each other or talked on the phone or sent them a birthday card on time? It is? Well, since I am lucky enough to have so many friends like that, including Amy, that’s just fine with me.