Life-Long Friendships Are Special

When I went to grade school in the late 1960s, it was the time of teacher's strikes in New York City. I attended a public school not far from where I lived with my parents. After my dad died when I was ten in 1967, and the strikes came on in 1968, my mom was worried about my schooling. She knew it would not be easy for her to put me into a private school, but because it was uncertain how long school would be closed, she looked into it. Mom found a religious private school Lutheran Elementary School two blocks from where we lived.

I remember the first day when my mom brought me to school. I was feeling sick to my stomach. However, it was the luckiest time of my life. I made two really good friends Leslie and Arlene, and the best thing of all was that we became friends for life and grew up together. We were 12 at the time, and we experienced our first crushes on boys and the trials and tribulations of growing up. The best way to form lifelong friendships is to live, laugh, and love not just for yourself but also for your friends,

Our favorite day of the week was Wednesday because our class attended the church across the street in the morning and enjoyed singing the hymns. At recesses, we played dodge ball and softball and always had lunch together. School became something to look forward too. When it was time for graduation after grade 8, we were nervous about going on to high school. However, in the area where we lived, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York, there was one Lutheran private school we attended and many Catholic private schools but no private high schools.

Luckily our area was a safe and wonderful neighborhood with a lot of Scandinavian immigrants. We found a high school, Fort Hamilton High School, a large building situated right near the shoreline with a great view of the water from the building's front. However, what high schoolers think of views? We entered, exited and socialized at the back of the school. I think that during those four years, I saw the front of the school, perhaps a handful of times.

The early 1970s was a great time for friends and high school. We had great crushes on teenage idols like David Cassidy and thrilled to his music and the Partridge Family TV show. We would bury our noses in magazines like 16 and Tiger Beat. Put up posters of our favorites and spend many hours giggling over boys. Our high school featured high school musicals every spring, and we hoofed and danced and sang our way through them. After school, there was the time spent at a local pizza parlor stuffing our faces and listening to the jukebox, which ate up our precious quarters. When we went shopping for the latest record albums and romance novels, we often stopped by Hinches, which was an ice cream parlor. When we didn't have enough money, we ate platefuls of crispy French fries doused in ketchup.

Those were the days indeed. Most of the time, all of us gathered at my mom's apartment because there was just more room. Record listening and laughing were the order of the day. After graduation, we still kept in touch, but then my friends got married and started having children and we sort of drifted apart. My friend, Leslie's husband, got a career with the army, so she became an army wife and had to travel around. Both of my friends have three grown children. When I moved to Riga, Latvia, I started thinking about them again being so far away. It was the Internet that helped me locate them. Unfortunately, Arlene doesn't choose to use the Internet, so we haven't been in touch much, but my friend Leslie who now lives in Florida, keeps in touch with me regularly by email. We contact each other as if all of those years had not passed by and we had just been together yesterday. This is a golden friendship now of 44 years and counting. Someday we hope to get together again.

This is my story of special and close friendships and how to keep them for a whole life long, I wrote this some time ago while I lived in Latvia, and now below, I continue my story.

However, we formed these lifelong friendships because we stayed close and true to one another. If you wonder that all it takes is to share your life's ups and downs with friends to continue friendships way beyond school, I nod my head and say yes, that is so true because we also shared all our joy and sorrows. Now I am in my retirement years, and my life has drastically changed. After my husband and soul mate died in Riga, Latvia, where I spent 20 years and from where I continued to contact my friend Leslie, I told her because of painful memories, it was time for me to return to the U.S. since it is my homeland, But where would I go?

And you know what happened? Because our friendship was so special and we were more like sisters than just friends, she let me know of an apartment I could have to rent. The apartment was right above her apartment in a two-story house in Florida. So now I live above my friend in Florida, and it makes me feel so good to know that I was right all along. If we have special friendships, we should never forget our friends. If we have drifted apart, then finding each other makes it even more unique, and now, once again, in our sunset years, we can be together and share all of the wonderful memories. Our other friend Arlene is now in Pennsylvania and has started drifting a bit more into the Internet, and I have been in touch. So perhaps one day, all three of us who were like the fictional Three Muskateers will once again be together