Friday, January 18, 2013

My highschool friends

I am an introvert, and that means I had lots of friends, but wasn't one of those 'in-the-yearbook' kind of girls.
The Flowery One, (it doesn't help to enlarge the low res picture)
When I took a vacation in the early 2000s, I came to North Carolina (from Florida) to visit my old friend The Flowery One and her husband The Silent One.

The Flowery One and I had gone to school together back in St. Louis from 7th grade through 12th.  During those years we studied, learned about boys, played sports on teams together, dated boys, questioned everything grown-up, made out with boys, pushed boundaries sometimes, and giggled a lot.  I was even in The Flowery One's first wedding soon after high school. But in 2000, after almost 40 years apart, we again made contact because another student wanted to do a gathering of our graduating class via the internet.


Three graces come together (what? we don't look like that?)
Our other friend, The Brain, had responded to this other student that she wanted to get in touch with us, so we all made contact again.  I may have the details of this wrong, but basically we started writing emails regularly in 2000.

The Brain and I had also spent a year together in college as well as all through high school.  I had written back and forth, ("snail mail" it came to be called) with The Brain several times in my life, and always enjoyed hearing about her and her husband, The Tall One, and sharing whatever was going on in our lives, including kids.


The Brain and The Flowery One enjoying pictures and ??? as teens

My teenage friends, wearing the styles of the time, scarves, bangs and curls of hair coming toward the cheeks


The Brain, riding her scooter in 2012, having lived with MS for many years


The Flowery One several years ago, in NC
The Flowery One after treatment for cancer


The apartment complex for seniors in WA state, where The Flowery One and The Quiet One moved in 2011
The Flowery One and The Silent One, Halloween 2012

Our email let us see how many similar choices we'd made through the years, and we continued to share these common bonds. We all loved cats and had left the religion which was the sponsor of our high school.  We sent support whenever one of us went through a tough time, and we sure did continue to share our love of the silly, and cats, and humor, and Halloween, and laughs, and story telling, and creativity in lots of ways.

I've tried to keep a record of the emails we exchanged, in hopes of writing some kind of memoir of our lives.  But working with thousands of emails is very tedious, to say the very least.  You can't just turn them into computer savable documents unless you copy them out of the internet server, which I've done with many.  Most of them remain in the land of the web.

So if I guess at something, I can go looking for what one of us said back at that time.  But for purposes of these blogs, I may often just write from memory.  If something important happens though, I'll go cut and paste from the emails again!  (Unless I get enough comments saying that it's not a good idea, that is.)

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday this week.  Sorry it hasn't got a thing to do with Alan's picture idea.  But this is what I've been wanting to share for some time.

16 comments:

  1. Oh the heck with The Prompting One when you have such sweet memories and charming photos to share. My mom and her high school buddies were her best friends for life too.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Funny how friendship doesn't mean that you have to see each other in person or even be in the same country.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks Wendy and Lovely's Blot, good that you all know about friendships too. These blogs are a new source of friends I've found too!

    ReplyDelete
  4. The whole point about the way Sepia Saturday has become structured is that there is no fixed theme that has to be followed. When I read as interesting a post as this, I know that it is the right way to do things.

    ReplyDelete
  5. This was lovely to read. Friendships that endure for so long are rare and wonderful. Thanks for the great post.

    ReplyDelete
  6. You make me realise that I have lost contact with all my friends from school. We must have missed out somwhere or isn't it a 'boys' thing?

    ReplyDelete
  7. (The Prompting One - that's funny Wendy.) Barb I really enjoyed reading this and viewing your pictures. That skirt was something wasn't it?

    ReplyDelete
  8. OK girls, crinoline pettycoats! Wouldn't have gotten through high school without them.
    Alan, thanks for being an understanding Prompting One!
    Bob, I don't think it's a girls thing, cause my sons have lots of close friends from school...but I think they've tried pretty hard to stay in touch. Sometimes it's also a matter of having interests that change in common, rather than too diverse (like ex spouses).

    ReplyDelete
  9. I definitely recognized you in one of the three graces! Friendship is timeless.
    If Wendy hadn't come up with The Prompting One, I might have suggested The Ruling One. But now I yield.

    ReplyDelete
  10. How wonderful that you have stayed in touch all these years. Can't beat friendships such as these.
    Nancy

    ReplyDelete
  11. Most certainly in the spirit of Sepia Saturday, thank you for sharing it. I think the impermamnence of emails is a bad thing. I have strived to save all my email correspondence since I first started using it about 17 years ago, but it's hard to do when software and hardware is updated so frequently, and it's definitely not an option to print them out - I would need another room in the house to store the paper.

    ReplyDelete
  12. The Blogging Police will be out to get you for the crime of straying from the theme:)
    A lovely post on friendship and great photos. I enjoyed reading it.

    ReplyDelete
  13. I enjoyed your post very much. How awesome that you have all stayed in touch over the years. I loved the pictures of you when you were in high school and college.

    Kathy M.

    ReplyDelete
  14. A most lovely story, of friends, and great photos to join in. I especially enjoyed the one way back when as teenagers looking over (probably photos of boys! surely!!!) Also, the Flowery one does have a nice apartment, awesome greenery out of the windows pictured!

    ReplyDelete
  15. How wonderful that your graduating class get to have an internet reunion. Lovely memories these are. Thanks for sharing them and for dropping by my nook.

    ReplyDelete
  16. THis is great, to have so many responses to what I figured was only interesting to 3 people in this world. That will teach me!

    ReplyDelete

There is today, more than ever, the need for a compassionate regenerative world civilization.