A Tale of Two Sixth Graders

If we’re lucky, we have a few truly good friends we cherish for life.  You know those friends — the ones you can tell anything to, the ones you don’t have to see/speak with all the time to pick right back up where you left off.

One of my best friends is S, someone I met in sixth grade.  To this day, we feel we’d win any game show challenge in the category of “Name a Great How-Our-Friendship-Began Story.”  I’ve always wanted to write it down and, so, for her birthday, I decided to finally document it.

Like I said, it was sixth grade.  You may recall those years as I do — awkward and fashion-challenged.  Especially in NJ in the mid-1980s.  My look of choice was the Aspiring Preppy:  shoulder pads, big argyle sweaters with two to three stacked polo shirts underneath (collars pointed sky-high, naturally).  Benetton, Esprit, Polo.  You get the idea. 

{Disclaimer:  My taste has since evolved.}

It is the first day of school and our English teacher gives us an assignment:  Pair up with the person sitting next to you and interview each other.  Find out a few interesting things about your interviewee and then present to the class. 

OK.  I turn to my left and there is a very nice, very chipper girl.   She is the polar opposite of me.  She has short, kind of spiky hair, whereas mine is in a French braid.  She’s wearing a long denim trench coat over her really colorful shirt and black pants.  But I’m staring at her shoes.  Her silver, checkered Chuck Taylors.  My penny loafers suddenly feel really dull.  Her notebook is covered with things like Worship Idol (as in, Billy), Public Image Ltd and little anarchy symbols.  She is far cooler than I could ever hope to be and she doesn’t even appear to be trying.  Meanwhile, like most sixth graders, I’m trying.  Hard.

But she is lovely from the start — not at all intimidating and not at all condescending toward my tragic argyle look.

We get down to the business of the assignment.  She asks how I spend my free time and I tell her I take ballet and tap lessons.  She tells me she wants to take archery.  God, she is cool.  Archery.

She asks me about my favorite music.  Why, Olivia Newton-John, of course.  Much to her credit, she doesn’t blink.  She tells me she likes The Sex Pistols.  I am at a total loss, and I tell her that I don’t think I can say that to the class.

But I do.  I tell the class all about my new friend S and I know instantly that she is unlike anyone I’ve ever met.

We begin to talk between classes in the hall, pass notes, etc. — all the things that sixth grade girls do.  I invite her over to my house because neither of us has begun our social studies project — a sign of procrastination solidarity that, unbeknownst to us at the time, would prove to last decades. 

This single evening of social studies perhaps cemented our friendship forever.  She arrives hours late (a harbinger of many events to come), with massive ambitions for a simple project.  Whereas my mother (“Oh, who’s your new friend?  Those are very interesting sneakers…”) and I had maybe mustered together some poster board and markers, S came equipped with a grand idea to make a planet by encasing a basketball in homemade paper mache and baking it so that we could then paint it to scale.  I reminded her that this wasn’t for any significant grade — no need to do anything major — but her ideas were big and, after all, it was only 8:30pm, she said.  She was a night owl at age 12 (actually, it turns out, from birth).  So I guess I’d be missing this week’s episode of “Family Ties,” then?  Yes, she said, as she handed me a mix tape to help make the project more fun.

A mix tape!  And what a mix it was — all kinds of things I had never heard.  This was no Olivia Newton-John.  I felt instantly cool telling my mom that we were listening to The Dead Kennedy’s (“The what?!”). 

But she, too,  liked S instantly, and has ever since.

The thing was — S wasn’t trying to corrupt me.  I wasn’t her pet project or anything like that.  She was really just being herself — and was probably the only sixth grader who could honestly do so — and she was opening my eyes to a million other things.  And  that is how it has been ever since.  She arrives late, thinks big and charms you to pieces.  And you learn something new every time.

We remained fast friends in high school, through the era of Depeche Mode and The Smiths (I told you my taste evolved) and “The Young Ones” on MTV (remember them?).  She never had just one crowd, but was instead that unique person who could befriend anyone in those high school hallways.  We snuck into the city with our group of friends many nights to hear music, find bars and just take it all in.  And by “it,” I of course mean the requisite amount of underage alcohol consumption that any dive bar in the East Village would allow.

In college, she went on to study art history in a very liberal school with like-minded souls.  My college was only 90 minutes away, so we saw each other pretty often.  We studied abroad the same semester — she went to Florence, and I went to Madrid.  We visited each other in our respective cities for some European adventures.  We met up in Prague as well, for which she was a full day late, pre-cell phone era.  But thanks to a pinned up note at the local American Express travel office, we managed to find each other.

When she got her first apartment in Manhattan on East 4th Street, I visited her often.  The tiny stall shower was beside the kitchen sink.  I moved to the city shortly afterwards, and we each grew up into progressively bigger and better apartments over the years.  She always had the next interesting book, magazine article, exhibit, film or band to talk about — and I was always five steps behind, eager to listen.

She moved away from New York briefly and then came back home.  And when her dad died a few years ago, I watched her pull together the most gorgeous impromptu tribute along the banks of the Hudson River at sunset, in a way that only she could do. 

I’m in the suburbs now and she’s in Brooklyn.  Our lives are different, and we see each other a few times a year.  It’s never as often as I’d like.  But it’s always a treat and it’s never even a stitch of strain to pick back up and resume talking as if it happened every day.

Of all the people in my life, S may have taught me more than anyone else.  She is the rarest gem of a person. 

So, Happy Birthday, my dear friend.  And thanks for talking to me that day in sixth grade, despite my bad sweater and awful taste in music.  I still think it’s one of the greatest “how we became friends” stories out there.