I just got back from a mini road trip to New Mexico. I went with Carrie, my oldest continuous friend. I don’t mean she’s old — she’s 33. I mean we’ve been friends, without a break, for a really, really long time — 22 years, actually. That’s longer than some of Marti’s classmates are old. I can’t say she’s my oldest friend, because that would be Crystal Hammer. We became friends in kindergarten, and even though her family moved away when I was in second grade, technically, she was my first consciously chosen friend. She had dark hair and blue-violet eyes and I always thought she was very beautiful. Her favorite color was purple, and since I couldn’t have purple too (why I’m not sure), I chose maroon as mine (it’s still my favorite color). Her mother walked us to school everyday, an arrangement that seemed to favor my mother, who never did. When she left I was sad, but I had a new dress, and the leaves were very beautiful and my older sister was fighting with my parents and I couldn’t tell you exactly when she left but that suddenly, the little house was empty. In a way, it was a relief, because they were Catholic and I was always trying to convert them. Exhausting for an 8-year-old girl, I know.
My next oldest friend is Kenola Linfoot. Kenola was three years older and had a wandering eye, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. I didn’t have to worry about converting her to becoming Assembly of God, because her family actually went to my church. Her dad ran the children’s church and I remember his wonderful puppet shows, his amazing ability as a pianist and the love he had for the kids. Kenola and I both worshipped him, and my parents quite unknowingly thought that having me spend the night at the house of a kid from church was a safe proposition. Kenola’s parents were wonderfully and shockingly lax in discipline, and we would wait every night until the house got quiet and then slip out her window to play with the neighbor boys, sometimes until the sun started to rise in the sky again. Then we’d slip back in through her window and sleep until noon, her parents none the wiser. We could do lots of things at Kenola’s house that we couldn’t do at mine, like move the furniture and make forts with all the cushions. We had screaming matches in the garden (I can scream louder than you!) and once we flooded the entire kitchen after watching an I Love Lucy re-run; we poured soap in and made suds just as big as Lucy did. We scooped it all up with dustpans, and the floor was sparkling clean when we were done. I think her mother even gave us a treat for cleaning the floor.
Kenola moved away when I was 9 years old, which was probably for the best. We used to sneak out of church early and walk two blocks to the local grocery store, where we would slip PlayBoy magazines into comic books and giggle at the naked women in funny positions. I got grossed out by a picture of a woman licking another woman’s breasts and didn’t want to look anymore, but I was too embarrassed to admit it.
I went to visit her for a few weeks every summer for several years; her dad had become a pastor in a city about 4 hours away. Years later he very scandalously admitted that he was gay, and that he was also dying of AIDS. This was 1989, and we hardly knew about AIDS, and it didn’t sink in that her dad was dying until he did. I saw Kenola once as an adult; I stopped at her house on my way to college after getting, after many years of silence, a Christmas card. Her father had died years earlier, but Kenola still mourned him. She had five boys of her own at that time, crammed into a little two-bedroom house along with her father’s piano — nothing but a box of wood and ivory without his beautiful fingers making music on it. After that visit I lost touch and haven’t been able to find her since.
Carrie and I became friends the year after Kenola left. I went to a new school, a private Christian school, and I felt very excited and important until I got bullied by the big kids and spurned by the little. I had, quite frankly, a miserable year there, only truly enjoying Kerry, the teacher’s assistant, and my beloved teacher Mrs. Hoffman. Mrs. Hoffman saw my misery and grieved for it, feeling, I think now, quite useless to alleviate it. She used to take me to her house sometimes and make muffins and let me sleep on her couch while her assistants kept the class for a few hours. In short, she loved me, and I basked in that love, and I would have done anything for her approval. My parents say she asked to be able to adopt me should anything happen to them, and I believe that. I loved her too.
Mrs. Hoffman decided, that year, that I was going to be a writer when I grew up, and she was so convincing that I foolishly majored in English in college and to this day, I write a lot of nonsense hoping to make a book happen. That year I also learned to listen when I prayed, and I heard a voice tell me to go to England when I grew up, and so I did. I went to England for a semester in 1996, and nothing much exciting happened, so I came home and took the only job available in the middle of the school year, a job at a Japanese women’s college in Spokane, Washington, and there my students convinced me to go to Japan one day, and I said I would, because I loved them. So, a year later, I applied for a job in Japan, and I got it, and then one day 18 months later I was sitting in an airport in Korea, waiting for my flight, when this Marine Corporal sat next to me and said his name was Andy, Andy Martinez, but his friends called him Marti….
Anyway, Mrs. Hoffman also decided I needed to be friends with Carrie Nair, the little girl who cried every day. She was also very sad, and the other girls were mean to her too, and she seemed a bit depressing, what with all the crying, but then I found out her best friend Leslie had been killed by a drunk driver while walking home from school the year before, and I found a tiny seed of sympathy in my 9-year-old heart and invited her to my birthday party.
Carrie brought me my worst gift ever, a much-loved animal of mysterious origin (monkey, perhaps?) that was a terrible color — bright pink, perhaps, or possibly puke brown, I don’t remember now. I was a bit taken aback when I saw it, but then she said it was one of her favorite stuffed animals, and she couldn’t buy anything else for me, and that seed in my heart grew a little because my parents didn’t have any money either, and I knew what it was to want to buy a gift and not have any money for it. So a few weeks later on the playground, when she invited me to play with her and the other nerdy kids, I went. I was awful back then, and completely unloyal, and if the ‘cool’ girls invited me away to play, I would go without a thought of leaving Carrie behind. I think I’ve felt bad about that for approximately 22 years, even though Carrie, to this day, can’t remember any of it.
The next year I homeschooled, and Carrie and her four sisters homeschooled, and I found a second home in their crowded, little-girl-underwear covered house. We played house in the backyard, and walked to the park, and later we babysat her sisters and burned lots of food, and even later we went to camps together and had crushes on boys together and I found a friend for life, all thanks to the persistence of one Mrs. Hoffman, who might just have been one of the biggest and best influences on my life so far.
Carrie moved away when I was 14, which was really terrible, and I felt adrift. Indeed, I did drift for a while, going from school to school, as homeschooling wasn’t nearly as fun without Carrie and the sisters to do it with. I learned the meaning of a long-distance phone bill, and when I was 15 I took the greyhound bus by myself all the way to her house — a 16 hour trip. I spent a few weeks every summer there through high school, and I grew to love the Willamette Valley in Oregon where she lived.
Later she went to college in Seattle and I in Spokane. I don’t know why I didn’t consider going to college in Seattle, where we could be together, but she had gotten married and was living quite a different life. For the next ten years she stayed still while I went all over the world; I needed an anchor, and she was it.
Now we’re both mommies, and more alike than we’ve been since we were 16, in lifestyle, anyway. We’re both grown up, and no longer ogle boys or trade our jeans, but we have something very rare and wonderful — a 22-year-old friendship. And this spring, we took both my kids and one of hers, and went with her mom to New Mexico. We got lost and tasted desert wine and ate really, really badly (I gained 7 pounds in just 4 days). We went to educational places and I had the strangest feeling of deja vu, as we quizzed our kids about stalactites and space walks the way her mom would have quizzed us when we were kids. In short, we had a great time.
Thanks Mrs. Hoffman, wherever you are.
