Old friends

When I think of old friends, I am not thinking in the present, that is in terms of my friends being of an age where we don't move as fast as we used to.  I am thinking of friends of years past, old friends.


I was recently thinking of my first friend, her name was Linda.  She lived up the block from me.  I think her dad was a carpenter because he built such neat things.  Linda was very smart and her birthday just happened to occur in the month before school started, whereas my birthday was six months later.  So, she wasn't so mucher old than I (I put the word "I" there for my younger friend Stacia, even though "than me" sounds better sometimes, no always), but she did get to go to school the year before I went and so she was ahead of me all through school, but we did other things together about the same time. 


I'm thinking about piano lessons which after a lady in our church taught us for a couple of years we went over to Hegeman's School of Music and were pretty much on the same track.  Then in high school she took up viola and I took up violin.  It was Linda's suggestion that in the summer we go early in the morning for our piano lesson because it wouldn't be so hot walking to and from there.  Smart, eh?


I remember in either her junior or senior year we practiced together so she could play for a recital, I think it was.  All I remember is practicing.  Her part was different from my part so it was a duet, but I don't remember playing it before any people.  Maybe there was much terror on my part at playing a violin duet and I have blocked it out.  Maybe Linda will read this and correct me and say it was all a dream.


As I mentioned her dad was handy -- better than handy -- with tools.  He built a wooden sliding board -- before there were the aluminum type slides and plastic slides, there were wooden slides.  It was quite tall.  So that we could slide very fast, we would from time to time get some wax paper and slide on the wax paper to make it very slippery, and then we would really zip down that thing. 


He (Uncle Ben, I called him) built Linda a play house.  It looked like a house it had windows, a door, and wasn't that small for us small people.


I glad that Linda didn't forget me as a youngster and we played together after school as long as mom let me go outside before it got too cold, and before I got too old to play with dolls.  I was glad when I was on the same time schedule as she was and that was when I started school the next year.  That year she was in Kindergarten was hard for me because all my other church friends were on the other side of Clements Bridge Road, a relatively busy street which I was not permitted to go near, so I had to play by myself until she got out of school for the day.


Thank you, Linda, for being my friend.


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