9/17/2012

It takes friends .....

How do you make a story?
With help from your friends and family..that's for sure.

I am working on a new story ---about junior high school. I have thought about this incident many time but just now crafting it to a story. Maybe its because of my current Memoir Class and the encouragement to capture stories from across your lifetime. That plays a part, true, but the biggest push is to tell stories that came before Jim. A long marriage is loaded with stories and I have some wonderful ones about Jim but I am holding those close right now.

Whatever the impulse to develop this story I am discovering how much I appreciate some bouncing my memoires off the recollections of others who were also there. Especially my friend, Betsy



Betsy and I have known each other since we were Girl Scouts in the Fourth Grade. We went through Piedmont Junior High School and Central High School together. And we have shared our lives since. We have accumulated a mountain of memories.

Betsy lives several hundred miles away. Thank heavens for the telephone.

Today we talked of Piedmont Junior High School and she shared what she remembers about the wonderful days of 13 and 14 year olds.  I am often awed by her encyclopedic memory of teachers, their names, subjects and their foibles.
We laughed.
We hooted.
We giggled
over the odd things we remembered about those old - to us then - people
who probably were not old at all.

"Don't you have your PORTHOLE?" she asked. Well no.

But she has her album from 1951 - the album from our ninth grade year.

Technology and email to the rescue.

She scanned some pictures and sent them last evening.

Now I have the faces of the Piedmont Faculty freshly in my eyes and memories are popping up
like popcorn in a pot on a hot burner.

Back to my point -

it takes a village to raise a child
and
it takes friends
to help turn misty memories
into real stories.

1 comment:

MissDazey said...

My good friend Georgia has a group of special friends. They started 1st grade together. (63 yrs) She can talk for hours telling tales. I've been friends with Georgia 45 years.

I love my long time friends and enjoy making new friends too.