Soapbox

Best Friends

    Once upon a time there were two little girls, and they were best friends. I can see them so clearly now in my mind: one with red curls, chubby cheeks and freckles; the other with a thin face and frizzy blond hair. I see their two heads bent together, making clothes for their paper dolls or writing a story. I see them talking for hours half-way up the maple tree and walking in the moonlight in their nightgowns on a warm summer night, and laughing, always laughing.

   We were called "the two Tracys", Tracy Lynne and Tracy Jean, and for most of the years between kindergarten and eighth grade we practically lived in each others pockets. We were best friends in the truest sense of the phrase. We slept at each others houses, raided each others refrigerators, shared each others secrets. Tracy and I, often accompanied by her little sister Stephanie, were always writing stories, acting out plays, dreaming dreams and, I guess,  helping each other grow up.

   I met Tracy in kindergarten at West Elementary school. I noticed her right away, of course, because of her name, and her lovely red hair. She was always nicely dressed, and I remember she had a box of grown-up, skinny crayons instead of the fat ones the rest of us kindergartners used.  At my house we had a big old box of odds and ends of various and sundry crayons. I don’t know if I had ever beheld a pristine box of 48 unbroken crayons before, let alone in the hands of a 5 year old. She let me use them- once. I remember thinking, "I should be friends with this girl".

   And indeed,  we became friends and occasionally went to visit each others’ homes.  I invited her to sleep over at my house once that first year but it didn’t go well: she got homesick and her father had to take her home after supper. I was sad and frustrated, but my mother explained that not all children grew up sleeping over at various cousins and grandparents’ houses all the time, as I had.

   It was either in kindergarten or first grade that the bee incident occurred. Tracy lived in a house perched on a hill, and the back yard was a steep drop off, covered with just ground cover, as mowing that slope would have been almost impossible. One day she and I and  Stephanie were playing and Tracy ran down the hill with us in pursuit. Suddenly she stopped and shrieked, "Mommy! The Bees are at me!"
   Her mother raced down the hill and snatched her from where she stood, frozen in pain and terror, over the yellow jacket nest she had stepped in. Stephanie and I got a few stings that afternoon, but Tracy had so many that we took a trip to the Emergency room to get an allergy shot, just in case. When we got home her mother put us all in a cool baking soda bath- I remember the porcelain tub and the way our voices echoed as we splashed and talked- and we counted all the stings. 47.
    Tracy Jean Foster, the girl who survived 47 stings at one time. How could you not be impressed? How could you not hang out with this girl, even if she wasn’t up to spending the night yet?

      My family bought a big house over on the east side of town and so I went to first grade at East Elementary school, and we didn’t see each other very often that year.  I think it was before second grade that Tracy’s family bought a house on the same street. I remember clearly counting down the days in joyful anticipation of her moving in. I knew it was the beginning of something big. Soon we could see each other every day! We could visit any time we wanted to, walk to school together and I would always have someone really interesting to play with. With  Melissa who lived behind me, I played horses and the Partridge Family (her favorite show). With Charlotte (who had an actual canopy bed) I dressed up and played princesses. That was all fine, but with Tracy- I took on the world.

   In addition to purely making noise and running off energy games kids play, like "bee-bombs" and "thorn finger" we were constantly coming up with some adventure  in our imaginations And usually, we wrote a story about it. Tracy was the leader, and she usually had the most interesting ideas, so I was happy to follow.  Some of our favorite themes that I recall were: orphans on the train bound for boarding school who run away, Little House on the Prairie (but we had to make up a new character because no one wanted to be that drippy sister Mary) , orphans at boarding school who out-wit the cruel headmistress… and then there was Star Trek.

   Her parents owned a color console television (!) and  many a Saturday night I hauled over my sleeping bag and we lay on the living room floor and watched the show with her parents. And so of course we incorporated Star Trek into our imagination games, but though we had our favorite characters (Chekov and Sulu) we ended up inventing our own characters to add to the cast.
  In addtion to the dashing, irreverent character Lieutenant…. Somebody that Tracy invented  as her alter ego,  she also came up with an unlucky sap named "Erwuzden Beesuckle" whom we adored putting into our games just because we had so much fun saying his name. Our Enterprise had as her Doctor one "Deformed Kellogg" whose face so wrinkled that it looked like a corn flake. This was the irreverent way her mind worked, and I loved it. Tracy had a flair that I desperately wished to have.
   We wrote a Star Trek play- a comedy, of course- featuring all these characters, and we rehearsed it endlessly. you see, Stephanie (the jester) kept deliberately flubbing her entrance and ad-libbing a new opening line and we would all dissolve into gales of laughter, after which Tracy insisted we go back and try again from the beginning. I don’t remember if we ever actually performed it for her patient parents or just rehearsed  it until we were bored and moved on.

   In addition to adventures like Star Trek, Tracy introduced me to mystery and thrillers. Together we read  a script she found in an old book of "Sorry, Wrong Number" as a radio play, and it consumed our imaginations for weeks. She also loved the show "Dark Shadows". We weren’t allowed to watch it at my house so after school I would head to the Fosters and we’d watch Dark Shadows, which I loved, and then The Price is Right, (which I didn’t) and when the final credits rolled I knew it was time to dash home ASAP for dinner.

   It was the great disappointment of our elementary school years that somehow we never managed to be assigned to the same class. Year after year we would walk to school at the end of summer when the class lists we posted, fingers crossed, and each year our hopes were dashed. Of course the teachers deliberately separated the two Tracy’s, probably figuring that we would just talk to each other all the time and want to be together in everything we did. I’m sure it made sense from an educational standpoint, but it broke my heart. It was like not being with your own twin!

    The Fosters had a house they visited summers down by the Ohio River, and sometimes they would take me along for a few days. It was heaven. We had acres to roam over, and SO many more things to imagine, plus her dad took us fishing. My grandpa had taught me how to fish, but the Big Darby creek and the Ohio river were very different.
    One summer my family stayed at a place called "Rolling Acres Vacation Farm" and took Tracy and Stephanie along. There was an old church with an ancient cemetery nearby and I was enthralled, touching the old stones and trying to make out eroded inscriptions, connecting long-ago families. Tracy decided that we must have a church service, and of course she would officiate, and so we wrote a script for that too. Whenever we weren’t sure what should come next we would say "And now, let us pray" and for the hymn we did "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" because I saw it in the hymnal and recognized the tune. My mother still has our script saved somewhere.

   My birthday is at the end of June, which I always hated because it meant I never got to have a party at school and bring cupcakes. (I was convinced that the kids would begin to like me if I could just bring in cupcakes!) But the up-side was that I could have a birthday sleep-over in my back yard. Most years we set up either the family tent or, later, our folding trailer. Tracy, Stephanie and I stayed up most of the night playing cards, eating snacks and talking and giggling and talking.
   One year we decided we were bored with cards and hungry. Tracy pointed out that it was only a few blocks over to the Stop-N-Go and so, in our nightgowns, we walked to the store some time after midnight. I remember vividly dancing and leaping under the street lights to watch our shadows move. It never occurred to us that this might not be a safe thing to do. In Athens in those days we almost never even locked our doors when we went away. Still, I’m sure that our mothers would have had a conniption if they knew about it.

    When we were in fourth or fifth grade, a boy from our grade named Keith died of cancer. Of course this was a desperately sad thing.  Many of us hadn’t known Keith very well because he had been sick for a long time and missed a lot of school, but  for some reason the principal decided that everyone in his grade needed to go to the funeral. There we were, swinging our short legs in the chairs at the funeral home behind my house, feeling awkward and uncomfortable witnessing the real grief of his family.
    For Tracy and I, this was the first funeral we had ever attended, and human nature being what it was, we kept finding ourselves possessed with fits of giggles. We tried to think of serious things to stop them- well I did anyway. Each time I would have myself in hand, Tracy would turn to me and pull a tragic mime of a sad face, and off  we would go into laughter, earning the wrath of Miss Ashworth. Years later my mother and sisters and I were in the exact situation at a cousin’s funeral service. None of us could look each other in the eye for fear of setting off paroxysms of coughing, and I kept thinking of Tracy and her sad face.

    Middle school was the beginning of the change. We could have been in class together at last, but I didn’t score terribly high in math, and so even though my English and science grades were probably on par with hers, Tracy was put in "first tier" classes and I was relegated to tier two. We still went to and from school together every day and talked a lot, but Tracy began to spend time with a girl named Carolyn, and I found I really like Carolyn’s friend Peggy. The four of us sometimes spent time all together but gradually we became more "Tracy and Carolyn" and "Tracy and Peggy".
   As we got older we found that we had less in common, and in high school we pretty much went our separate ways. We were still quite friendly… just not really friends. I got into theater and took different classes and hung with a different group most of the time. Tracy was interested in boys, who were most definitely not interested in me, so I couldn’t blame her for not hanging around.
    After high school, I don’t remember seeing her at all, although I ran into her parents in town a few times during college and then in nursing school.

   One day a few years ago, I brought in the mail and found a letter from Tracy Jean. I was amazed and delighted that she would want to find me again after so many years. In the years since then I have reached out and found a lot of lost friends, but Tracy is the only one who has ever come looking for me. We corresponded a few times-  I told her about my kids and my poetry and she sent me an essay she had written and had published, and some pictures of her new house, her husband and her cat. We didn’t write often, but it was always a treat to find a letter from her in the mail. After almost 30 years we were both  very different, of course, but that didn’t matter. We still connected as "the Two Tracys". We talked about getting together- we weren’t that far apart, but it didn’t work out, and we figured there would be time to arrange something later.

   Yesterday my dad called to tell me that he had heard, through a friend of her parents, that Tracy had died the day before. He had almost no information about what had happened except that it involved a coma and turning off the ventilators. I was in shock.
  This being the modern age, I posted about it on Facebook and high school friends began replying with messages of surprise and sadness- and condolences for me. For me! I hadn’t seen the woman since I was 18 years old, so their concern, while appreciated, seemed a trifle misplaced.
   Last night had a sad dream about Tracy and her sister Stephanie, that they were both ill, but still so funny and warm and loving. This morning I found her obituary on line and made some calls to see if I could get my shift covered at work to go. Then I went up to take a shower, and that’s when it hit me. I leaned against the cool tiles and let the water run over me and just sobbed.
   "I hate being old!" I wept at last, though that’s not really it. I think I just miss those two funny, crazy little girls. I miss smashing up cold Wonder bread into tiny, dense cubes and calling it "metal bread" and laying on our backs in the grass, looking up at the sky, dreaming. I miss knocking on her front door and knowing I would always be welcomed in. I think everyone should have a place like that. Thank you, thank you Fosters, for welcoming the odd little chatter-box that I was into your family for all those years!

   It occurs to me today, looking back, what an amazing gift it is to be able to have a best friend like that. And it is a gift that never stops giving, because at that age, the bonds we form become part of the foundation of who we are for the rest of our lives. The lessons I leared in our adventures I carry with me today. So I suppose that since I am still, deep inside, that skinny blond girl, then  red-headed Tracy Jean is still with me, whispering in my ear, and we are still the best of friends.
    I like that thought.