A Time Of Innocence; A Time Of Confidences

I was thinking today about my first “best friend.” I’m not sure I have a “best friend” now – it always seems a little strange for adults, unless they’ve been best friends from childhood – though I do have a small circle of close friends, then a circle of slightly less close friends (this is usually dictated more by time and circumstances than by liking) – and then a vast, protean group of friends – i.e. people I would turn to in a pinch and trust with secrets if needed, but who, at this time, are not very close – and then an even larger group of friendly acquaintances who are people I don’t know well enough to be friends, but with whom I might hang out and have a beer at a con.

However, in childhood there always seemed to be a “best friend” who was as close as any sibling, only usually one’s age. My best friend was Isabel, the girl who lived across the street from me, and our friendship was very much the stuff of Ray Bradbury stories. (The ones that were a celebration of magical childhoods, not the ones where something creepy comes out of the undergrowth and steals your bones.)

First, we were as close to pure opposites as two kids can be. Oh, by American standards we were both dark haired. Okay, so she was “Portuguese blond” but that’s a whole other concept. The resemblance stopped there. She came from a family of thirteen kids. (She was number 11.) I came from a family of two “only children,” my brother being almost ten years older than I and mature for his age, meant I was closer to having three parents than a sibling. I was – again, by Portuguese standards. I was a size 7 when I got married – tall and massive. She was small and so slim my graceless cousins nicknamed her x-ray when we were ten. I could trip on both my feet while standing still, but I wrote stories more or less compulsively from the age of six. She was dyslexic and weird things happened to her words on the way between brain and hand. (She could tell me “metal is composed of ions” but she wrote “metal is an ion.”) On the other hand, she was a very promising ballet dancer until upheaval and a change of governments closed the program in which she was learning.

We did have some things in common, though. We both read – possibly too much – and traded books back and forth across the street. And we were both gifted with a tendency to overthink things, which meant we spent a lot of time talking over everything under the sun and – mostly – sharing ignorance.

We were almost – by the standards of today – charmingly innocent. And by that I don’t mean that we didn’t know the facts of life. We sort of figured those out by piecing bits of information. It’s not that arcane. It’s more that we grew up almost in isolation, in a place and at a time when no one thought it very important to disabuse us of our illusions about how the world worked. We used to build entire structures of “this could happen,” before we learned better (usually years later.)

We attended the same one room school. Our class had twelve girls in it, but was usually paired with another class of twelve. Though there was a fireplace in the room, it was never lit in the time I attended and in winter sometimes the ink would freeze in the inkwells, and we’d have to hold them in our hands to defrost. On the other hand, we got recess for however long the teacher felt like. If she was under the weather it might be two hours or so. Time enough to dream.

I think I was the one who invented the games, but I could never have imposed the insanity on the others without Isabel’s cooperation. You see, most of what the girls did – jump rope, hopscotch, elastic – jumping, catch – I was terrible at. Actually to this day I have to manage jumping rope ONCE. As for elastic? Hopeless. No, I also never managed to ride a bike. My brother has the exact same issues, so it might be genetic. But I read a lot, and I had a fertile imagination.

In retrospect, what I came up with was sort of a proto-acted-out-version of role playing games. I had these general scripts and then we acted them out and the battles counted. There were many, including WWII (don’t ask) and Explorers in Africa and (later) Colonizers in a New Planet. I’m fairly sure we played Three Musketeers too, when I read it, but I can’t remember details.  Except I think I was Athos and my friend was Aramis.  However, the favorite, by far, was Robin Hood. I got to be Robin Hood and my best friend – of course – got to be the Sheriff. (Equal parts, see.) Various favored friends filled in the secondary roles. I always felt a little sorry for the girls who played girls. Their general role seemed to be “look pretty” and “use trickery” and I had no patience for that sort of thing. But some girls, inexplicably, seemed to prefer it. (In retrospect, I think it was the “look pretty” part and “pretend boys will fight over you, even if it’s just a game.”)

Various parts of the playground were the forest or the castle. We got quite good at the fights. The field next door to the school was not cultivated and had an extensive patch of bamboo, which we raided for swords. We got quite good at taking care of minor scrapes and cuts, too, without the teacher finding out, but when the game was good there would be blood and torn clothes we couldn’t hide. I remember the teacher saying she’d never had a class of girls as troublesome as us and that we played more like boys than boys. It’s probably wrong to still feel proud of this.

At the end of fourth grade only five of us went on to preparatory school (preparatory for highschool, lasting two years.) The rest went to work in the textile mills and after that we more or less lost touch with those.

Isabel and I went to the preparatory school together, though for some reason (alphabetic, probably) we were never in the same form. But we walked home together, and we studied for tests together and we still traded books.

In seventh grade we entered different high schools, as I went to a magnet school downtown… And we drifted apart for a time there. We drifted back together after I was an exchange student to the US for a year. She had spent a Summer in France and both experiences changed us.

We tried out the “early adulthood” stuff together – going shopping on our own, and first money earned and that sort of thing.

She got married – to a Frenchman! – the year before I did. For a long time, we corresponded and kept in touch by phone. But as my Portuguese became more… er… problematic… it became more daunting to call her. Particularly since the idea of having to explain to her children who I am, in French, is enough to reduce me to silence. (And you guys know how hard that is.)

Still, she was the first person to see my writing. For a long time, she collected my juvenalia. I don’t think she has any now (I hope.) One would like to avoid what can only be called a “For Us The Living.”

And all this came to mind because I friended her daughter on Facebook (that I know of, her mom is not on facebook. At least not that I can find) and I was looking at a post of hers today, with pictures of herself and her relatives and friends. Her daughter is one year older than my older son. (Her son is somewhat older.)

It occurred to me how unnatural this is. Looking at her daughter, who does look somewhat like my friend, it seems odd that I didn’t see this kid grow up, that she knows next to nothing about me. You see, in normal circumstances, if we’d stayed in the village, we’d probably be ersatz aunts to the other’s kids. As is… well, my kids have heard about her, but I doubt they remember her name, as such. I’m sure the same is true the other way around.

I’m sure her kids, like mine, have their own friends and their place in the world.

But in a very Bradbury way, I’m fairly sure somewhere in the multiverse, there are still two little tomboys engaged in a rousing mock sword fight through one of the endless recesses of childhood.

I wonder if she knows how much I miss her?  And I wonder who she grew up to be.  And I wonder if we’d still be friends now, were it not for time and distance.