Everett Junior High, Class of 1977

A few years ago, at lunch in the garden of my house, my mother leaned conspiratorially forward between bites of whatever we were eating and whispered, almost in a hiss, "You know, if you don't have friends, you have nothing."

Clearly those words have stayed with me because here it is years later and I'm still caught in a loop of that moment, a combination of agreement and also surprise.  Because really, that doesn't seem the norm, does it, for a mother to lean forward and hiss the supreme value of friendship.  Not extoll the superior bonds of family, but directly reinforce the primacy of friends in our lives. Finally, an overt statement of something my mother has, to her credit, spent a lifetime demonstrating through her actions. 

She's absolutely right and don't I know it.

I have a hard time imagining my mother-in-law speaking those words, though.  To her credit, I always feel her hat is thrown in on the family side of the net. But I digress.  A smidge.

Last night I had a mini-reunion of classmates from the Everett Junior High Class of 1977, three of us.  Two of us went on to Lowell, where we became friends with a fourth person, who was also there last night. Of course the names totally matter, but I'll leave them out here.  What matters more to me right now is that strong bond of friendship that has lasted through the years, through a lot of years, that way those friends feel so much like home to me.  Like family.  So much time can pass between seeing each other but yet at each reunion, each moment, I am just delighted.  Not just with the two from Everett I saw last night, but also everyone I knew at Everett, down to the teachers, too, and then at Lowell.

It's true. Without them, I have nothing.

Or really without them, I would be missing something so precious, this link to a shared hilarious past in the San Francisco of our youth when we were at the center of our own universe, when we ruled the streets, when the city was ours, block by block, when we stood in line for hours outside the Coronet Theater on Geary for the very first showing of the very first Star Wars movie.  Those days really and truly were glory days. We knew it then and we know it now, reveling in it whenever we see each other, sharing that always.  No matter where our lives individually lead us, it's as though we're still french-braided together starting at our beginnings, bonds that really and truly last.

Amazing.

For me, Everett Junior High in 1976, the goofy bicentennial, red-white-and-blue everything year, was the beginning of my real life.  The year I transferred there from the French school was the year I woke up as an individual, found my own smarts, made friends, smoked pot, bought records, went to parties.  That was the start, in short, of having fun.  Of having friends and my own thoughts and fun. Those were some crazy days for sure, the way it felt to be in a gifted program that occupied the top floor of a three-story building, the gauntlet it could seriously be on the staircases leading there, the need to be, when outside Cluster V, on constant guard lest I be cornered somewhere, a hand thrust up my skirt, or rings or lunch-money taken.  There were plenty of things to be scared of in those days, neighborhoods we'd never enter alone if at all, people who hated us, not even so much for how we looked as for what they thought we represented.  It was a jungle out there.  There was safety in numbers and so we moved. It was risky and it was great.

Many, many of my friends from Everett went on to Lowell.  Though we didn't necessarily hang out together in the same way once we little fish moved on to the big, big pond, still those bonds remained.  And we made new ones.   In many ways, though, it's constantly surprising how little I knew about anybody's real life in those days, their life at home, a point driven home for me by my classmate Frances's To Have Not.  How little I saw of how people really lived, what their family lives were like.  We were all free of that, unfettered in our shared classrooms and hallways and lawns and courtyards at school, defined purely by what we ourselves did.  Maybe we were still children, but we were already, even in those days, already the adults we would become, perched like little dragons on the treasure of our own enormous potential.  It's no wonder I can never participate when people are complaining about school, about the drag junior high or high school was.  It was never that for me.  It was my cradle, the place I, as me, was really born, together with all of these remarkable people I am still so happy to count among my friends.

All those friends made me what I am.  Yes, my parents had a hand in it, for sure.  Of course.  But it is to my friends that I bow low, for the total freedom in which we have always operated with each other, not joined by biology but by ties that matter even more.

To all of you, my friends from my block, from Everett, from Lowell, Thank You.  We're still friends after all this time, miles and years away from the sidewalks and classrooms where we first met.  I still feel you in my corner, as I'm in yours, you people who know me better than anyone and longer than most.  I am stunned this morning, following the mini-reunion last night, by how great this all still feels, by how true my mother's words really are -- how without you, I have nothing.  With you, I have it all.

Thank You and Love Always,

XX