Through the magic of Facebook I’ve been back in touch with an old friend from public school. Veronica and I became friends in the sixth grade. We co-edited a class newspaper, and our teacher, Mrs. Parks, photocopied it for us on sheets of pink 8 1/2 x 11″ paper we folded in half. It was called “Portable Previews” and I wrote the horoscopes. Veronica and I were allowed to stay in our portable after we ate our lunch and pecked out our masterpiece while listening to Tone Loc on 680 am on a little radio in the classroom. (I still know all the words to “Wild Thing” and “Funky Cold Medina”.) We had lots of sleepovers and talked about the boys we were obsessing about (they shall remain nameless in this post, but she and I both know exactly who I’m talking about).
We’ve been exchanging e-mails, updating each other on what our lives are like now. Oddly enough, Graham was good friends with her older brother in high school, just another of those weird little coincidences between he and I. At the end of the last message I sent her, I told her that I remembered the aloe plant she had in her bedroom. She had made a little sign out of a piece of white paper and in pencil had written “Al O.” on it and stuck it on the side of the pot. She wrote me back and said,
“LOL LOL LOL….I’lll write back later but I just said to tell you I could not believe you remembered my plant named Al O. That made my day.”
The fact that she took the time to tell me that made me feel great, and I laughed out loud remembering not just that plant, but other dumb stuff we did together before adolescence and female bullying took complete hold and made life for me rather miserable for awhile. She never contributed to that awful grade seven bullshit, though, and for that I’m grateful.
