Off to Montague, MA!

Saturday is my fifty-ninth birthday.  I am running away for the afternoon with one of my dearest friends, Paige, with whom friendship stretches back full fifty-four years. We met in kindergarten and have been close ever since. We have always had one of those friendships that has been easy to step back into, even when we have not seen one another for years. She and I wrote my first stories together during what we called junior high back then. Middle school had not been used as a label yet.

These years held much terror and pain back then, much as they do for kids these days. We were poor and I wore hand-me-downs from my sister who was far heavier than I, and I was a bit overweight then. Furthermore, when I had dared to ask my mother for a hair cut, in one of her psychotic episodes, she dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night, yanked my hair into a pony tail and hacked off a chunk of hair with pinking shears. Let's just say I did not set any fashion trends that year. And let me also say that my mother was absolutely devastated the next day that she had done this to me and she tried to even it out. She was so guilt-ridden she drank for two solid weeks to drown out her guilt.  She was difficult when she drank, but she was not psychotic; she was rarely a mean drunk at all back then. She was a tortured soul is all...

Needless to say, I was bullied quite a bit, as were some others. I think that the middle school age is the most brutal age. We are all scared and do not know how to cope with raging hormones, constantly changing bodies and urges. And to have the wrong clothes and hair and to be the "wrong" size? What saved me sometimes was my mouth. I had a quick wit and could turn a crowd sometimes.  I try not to think of those two years much.  They were lonely and terrifying.

Yet Paige did not desert me, even though she even had a BOYFRIEND. She did not like the cliques, the pressure to conform, any of it. We learned to create a wonderful game that filled the hours with an entire world of our own. The days before instant ANYTHING except pudding...

We were both Beatles fans and all things Brit. So we would call one another and create our own soap opera with a complete cast of characters. We would have British accents and assume the characters and have adventures on the phone. When we tired of the Brits, we invented a cast of California kids as well, and invented beach and our image of California hills, mountains and desert stories. We would sneak into our parents' bedrooms where the spare phones were and stay on the phone for hours, until one or the other was discovered and end our adventure du jour to the tune of some mother screaming at us.

And in the summers, when she was at camp and I was at the Lake, we wrote to one another. We wrote twenty page letters--scripts really. Full of intrigue, deception, pain, humor, and all sorts of things of which we knew absolutely nothing. I'd get TWO fat packets and run down to our little ledge by the water, where there were two Adirondack chairs, and I would read them aloud. I know she did the same. By the end of each of those two summers, we had literally hundreds of pages FULL of our imagination, on BOTH sides.

She was my salvation. 

We have never lost our joy of creating, side by side. I taught her to paint and we spent eight to ten evenings, creating in the studio I had here for about four months. We once spent an entire afternoon in Pennsylvania saying almost nothing to one another while she worked on her book and I worked on a painting, played the piano, and worked on some writing. We have both felt that her three day runaway to me in PA was one of our closest times. We also went exploring and found a raptors' rescue place in the middle of nowhere. Let me just say that central PA has more middle-of-nowhere spots than anywhere I know. You drive through a tiny town that is five buildings on either side of the road, drive over a farm hill and suddenly enter a forest, round a bend and the road opens wide to a divided highway and you are in the middle of a magnificent mountain range, then find yourself once again lost in the farmlands, with huge bales of hay tied as the Ammish do, so they look like giant women bent over so all you see is the outline of their bottoms and a flowing skirt of gold flaring around them.

It is mythic sometimes. And on that day, after the raptors we found middle earth just down to the right of the road, in the sun-dappled forest. Water pouring down the far bank which was nothing but a coal black wall reaching straight up until it was lost in foliage that seemed to grow sideways. But the rocks in the stream were completely coated in moss, and the foliage around us had no undergrowth. The effect made the very air slightly green and glowing, and the rushing water seemed hushed, as it fell and danced around completely cushioned rocks. Paige and I simply wandered along the stream, saying little, until she said, "Now THIS is really Middle Earth."

Of course it was.

And it is with this pure gem of a woman that I will escape packing boxes and the business of moving, and suburbia for an afternoon of nothing but books and laughter. We once sang the entire "Ladies of the Canyon" Joani Mitchell CD... without the CD, as we drove home from PA.

It cannot help but be a perfect day. I am one of the luckiest women on the planet in the friends I have. All is well. All is NORMAL. It is so wonderful to be able to have a whole week of simply living. Plenty of little highs in the week, but absolutely not a low in sight. One thing about my life; I have learned to absolutely savor the times of "average" days. Hum-drum is under-rated, I think. I am LOVING hum-drum.

Tomorrow, however, will be special. It's all I have planned for my birthday, and that came as a surprise when Paige called in the afternoon to suggest it. So you all have a stellar weekend. I'm gonna go play.