Elizabeth

I cried a lot as a kid.

It was the 90’s, and I was a crybaby. My feelings were easily hurt and I learned to make up “valid” excuses for the tears I shed.

Sometimes my best friend hurt my feelings. but she was still my best friend, and a good friend.

She was 3 years older than I was (I suppose she’s still 3 years older than I am... funny how time works), and much much cooler. The foundation of everything I’ve learned and everything I know was built from that friendship. I wouldn’t exchange a moment of it.

The first sentence of Free to Learn by Peter Gray says it all:

“I’ve learned from hundreds of great teachers over the course of my life, but if I had to pick the single greatest it would be Ruby Lou.”

Only for me, it was Elizabeth and we were across-the-street neighbors.

Elizabeth didn’t teach me to ride a bike as Ruby Lou did for Peter, but she did teach me to make tortellini's from scratch, appreciate the art of everything paper, play without pretending, love a hammock, and imagine a better world.

Elizabeth taught me togetherness.

Always barefoot, outside, and wild, if I stubbed and cut my toe, she would tend to the wound using 10 times the amount of bandage as was needed. The excessive dressing would cause a limp, rather than the injury itself. Her care and attention healed all emotional and physical hurt.

Laughter, I realize in writing this, is truly the best medicine. Walking away from a stubbed toe with a dramatic inch-thick layer of bandage was preposterous, and we knew it. Our friendship was a comedy.

My mother, the dearest of dears, is notorious for hoarding candy. She has a tremendous weakness for sweets, which kept us on the lookout for stashes of discounted Holiday treats throughout the year. One particular afternoon in early summer, Elizabeth spotted the corner of a light green and brown box at the top shelf of a particular kitchen cabinet. She asked my mother what it was, and, torn between being a dear and a candy hoarder, my mother made an attempt to brush her off. Elizabeth, curious, or knowingly (I’ve never thought to ask), insisted that she bring it down to show us.

It was a solid cookies n’ cream Easter bunny. This was the jackpot and we all knew it.

We left with the ears, feeling satisfied. There is something magical about being a child and discovering, and being in on, an adult’s innocent secret.

I’m not sure how we got from that point to the next, but ultimately, we decided to transform a cute child’s play cabinet of Elizabeth's into a candy store. Our brothers would be our customers, and we got to work setting it up in Elizabeth’s room.

At Elizabeth’s house, candy was not kept under such a lock and key, so we went through the pantry and helped ourselves, collecting European licorice and hard candies, chocolates and jelly bellies.

We cut the bunny ears into delectable, bite-sized pieces, labeled and arranged everything, and gave each of our brothers a dollar. The $2 wouldn’t clear our stock, but ought to be enough, we figured, to encourage the boys to spend beyond their initial allowance.

My brother spent the dollar, but not a penny more.

Elizabeth’s brother kept his dollar.

Both of our fathers were engineers, though I wouldn’t say this had an extraordinary impact on our relationship. I thought her father was an architect until my early 20’s when a couple of Swedish Architect friends visited Atlanta and I arranged for them to meet her father in his office downtown.

Elizabeth, I’ve come to learn, was very close with her father growing up. I didn’t have the same bond with my dad but have since developed wonderful relationships with both my father and hers.

I don’t actually remember how old we were when Elizabeth’s family moved from the house across the street to a big house in Midtown. Before she left, she wrote a message on the inside of my bedroom window with an Expo marker in delicate, perfect, level, penmanship. This sentence, surely confounding to kids today, epitomizes our 90's upbringing..

Though part of me knew this would be the end of our active friendship, Elizabeth would forever be my best friend. She would jokingly acknowledge this unspoken, mutual agreement roughly 20 years later when my mother and I visited her in Alabama, as she caught herself commenting on some unknown current “best friend.” The three of us cried tears of laughter, or perhaps we laughed tears of reminiscence.

It would be years before I’d transfer the window message to paper and erase the black ink from a window that gazed upon a house that had long since been hers. I don’t think I ever reread the message after I’d transferred it to paper. The magic, I've come to realize, was in her handwriting, in sitting in the sunny spot where she’d sat when she wrote it. The evidence of our friendship was so much more than the words she wrote.

When I share Elizabeth and my friendship with others, our ages justify our autonomy. It was perfectly appropriate for us, at ten and seven to be using knives and fire. So we learned to cook.

I didn’t grow up with cable tv (another concept lost on the youth), so I (very infrequently) got my fix at Elizabeth’s house. Seldom making it through an episode of Jamie Oliver’s Naked Chef before getting up to cook something ourselves, their television, small and in a tucked-away room, was a resource for information more than a source of entertainment. I don’t remember what we made for our first restaurant, but that’s what we called it when we cooked for our families. We’d spend a day creating a menu, cooking its items, and inviting our parents and brothers over for a proper sit-down meal. We named one of our restaurants Bok Choy, after the vegetable of the evening. Our first restaurant surely featured chicken sausage tortellini's, made from scratch, as making these prominently stands out in my memory.

One summer, after Elizabeth’s family returned to Atlanta with more peaches than four people could attempt to consume, we took it upon ourselves to create a fruit stew. Peaches, jams, juices, and anything else sweet went into the pot. I remember it being surprisingly delicious and looking forward to enjoying a bowl when I went over to play the next day.

But I was too late, her mother had turned it into jello.

Several years before they moved, Elizabeth’s family built a pool in their backyard. A small concrete pool that was not at all enticing for tender-skinned children, but inspired a vision to build an underground water tunnel to a creek in my backyard. My backyard did not have a creek in it, but we thought it’d be pretty cool if it did. Evidently, walking across the street to one another’s houses wouldn’t suffice for much longer.

If children crave anything, it’s secrets and privacy. An underground tunnel would provide access to exactly the places we already had access to, but the path between would be hidden from pesky others like mothers and brothers.

Unlike my adult self, the freedom of a bicycle was not necessary for my friendship with Elizabeth. We lived across the street from one another and didn’t care to bother with the hassle of stairs and helmets. We didn't long to take our friendship on journeys away from our houses. We did not play pretend, but we did not lack imagination. This is not to say we didn’t have bikes, or even that we didn’t pull them out from time to time. One of my family's bikes had a banana seat, which fit the two of us quite nicely. Discovering that we could ride from my driveway into hers, and back was a short-lived joy. Perhaps we weren’t wearing helmets, or simply the risk of being hit by a car led my mother to warn us. If we continued, we’d be confined to our sides of the street for the remainder of the afternoon. We didn’t listen and, true to her word, were banned from playing together. We spent the better part of, what seemed like an hour, sitting on our respective curbs, bringing gifts of flowers, notes, and random organic materials to the middle of the street, for the other to then collect moments later.

As loving and attentive as our parents were, they seldom appear in my memories of childhood play. Both with working fathers and stay-at-home moms, we were free. We knew how to take care of ourselves when we could, and find an adult when their help was needed.

My backyard had a magnificent magnolia tree, in the throngs of which we spent many many afternoons.

We were eating apples the day I fell out of the magnolia tree. My memory of this moment, fixed and edited by the thousands of times I’ve remembered it, recalls a dramatic event. As I fell. I let go of the apple in my hand, which seemed to levitate momentarily, before chasing me to the ground.

I don’t remember how long I rested afterward, perhaps an hour, perhaps the afternoon. I may have joined my family for dinner at the kitchen table that evening, and was climbing again before the end of the week. At least that’s how I like to remember it. There was no need to traumatize such an unlikely event. Never would another kid be harmed by that tree.

And then there was Olivia, who lived next door. Three years my junior, our age difference was the same as Elizabeth and myself, but I was not friends with her in the same way I was friends with Elizabeth. There were times when I would play with Olivia, but never with both.

Unless we were teasing her. This, I feel an incredible amount of guilt and shame for. But also that it is important to share.

I cried a lot as a child, but I also teased others.

We like to tell ourselves that good people do good things and bad people do bad things, but the truth is much more complicated than that.

Sometimes bad people do good things and sometimes good people do bad things. I like to think of Elizabeth and I as good people who sometimes did bad things like teasing Olivia.

Olivia was not allowed to cross the street without an adult. Of course, Elizabeth and I could have played on my side of the street, which was also Olivia’s side of the street, but we didn’t. Instead, we pretended not to hear her calling to us to join our play. Refusing to restrict our own freedom, we ran into and across the street at our leisure, rode a bike, or constructed an elaborate hop-scotches that wound from Elizabeth’s stoop, down the sidewalk and into the road. Olivia's voice would fade, and we would continue our play. Our hop-scotches were epic. They included cartwheels and spins, backward leaps, and hand walking.

On a warm summer evening or two, Elizabeth and I crept under Olivia’s bedroom window to make ghost sounds. We never found out if she heard us, if she was in her room, or asleep already. The thrill was in sneaking and teasing.

Because children crave few things more than secrets and privacy.

Every good childhood has a scary neighbor. Ours was Mr. Tom, or perhaps that was his father’s name or both of their names. The Mr. Toms, father and son, lived together, next door to Elizabeth and across from Olivia. Their yard was at least two normal lot sizes, and would otherwise have enticed us to include in our play. Stepping onto their property was trespassing, we knew this and took it very very seriously. We wouldn’t even play near their property, in fear that we may accidentally cross the property line. While these rules didn’t apply to animals, we were certain their fate wouldn’t be too dissimilar to our own. Death by Mr. Tom was a very real possibility.

Elizabeth’s cat, Nala, flaunted her freedom to trespass. Our fears mounted as we watched from Elizabeth’s bedroom window one afternoon. Mr. Tom, working on his car, had left the driver door open and Nala climbed inside. How the cat evaded Mr. Tom’s gaze and mortal grasp amazed and terrified us. Watching for the entirety of the afternoon, it seemed, we made a plan of action if Nala were to be captured. Even though we were certain of the situation’s genuine severity, our plan didn’t include seeking adult assistance. We knew our parents wouldn’t have taken it seriously, so including them would have been futile. Eventually, as though she knew, Nala left the car when Mr. Tom's back was turned. Casually, she strolled down the Mr. Toms' driveway, totally unaware of the risk she’d taken, or the life she spent.

We relaxed and went out to play.

Elizabeth was three years older than I was, which is a significant age gap for children. Just as we never included Olivia in our play, Elizabeth didn’t include me in play with her peers. Evidently, she and her friend Libby would yell mockingly across the street that they wouldn’t play with me. I’m sure my feelings were hurt, and that I cried, but I don’t actually remember this outside of my mother’s retelling.

My mother, the dearest of dears, felt my pain. She’s a true empath.

I only remember going to Elizabeth’s new house once. It felt dark and cold. The few times we’d seen each other since their move, Elizabeth had described it as such, so it felt that way when we visited. It may have been a chilly season and a lovely house. We ate cheese on crackers, walked to a nearby park, and ate dinner from the grill. It was a surreal event. We walked her dog, Winnona, named for the street they’d moved from, and I still lived on. Winnona was a puppy when they first got her, they still lived on Winnona Drive, and we were still young and barefoot, too often forgetful of Winnona’s landmines.

I’m sure I cried when we left their big house in midtown. Or maybe when we arrived.

I cried a lot as a kid.

This visit to her new house, dining, and visiting was the closure to a chapter I already knew had ended.

Our friendship, I knew, would look and feel different, but it would last our lifetimes.

My tears were not tears of emotional or physical pain, but simply an expression of emotion that I'm grateful to have given the space and grace to shed.

It was the 90’s, after all, and I was still a crybaby.