It's Spring Break this week and while it would be so nice to have our toes in the sand and the sun on our faces we sometimes just have to take what we can get and be thankful. Today we made a day trip to an indoor trampoline park about two hours away from our home. The trip being a reward for getting all A's on her last report card and for Spring Break.
The only person she wanted to ask to go with her was her best friend, which happens to be a boy, a very well behaved and nice young man. I've had the privilege of getting to know him better this school year because of their evolvement together on the Academic Team and I'm glad. I can now say I know him when I hear a million stories about him after school throughout the week.
Spending time with them today immediately took me back to all the good times I had with my best friend growing up, whom also was a boy. Watching them interact threw me directly back to kick ball games on William Hill Lane and wrestling in J Fayes living room with my childhood best friend Chris. The similarities were uncanny, the laughter was unending, the conversation between them challenging because no one wants to be wrong, the brutal honesty that friendships lack these days and just the easy going banter. That "no holds barred" banter that you better be willing to take if you're brave dish it out.
This friendship with the boy out the street is what made my childhood so exciting, so challenging....so memorable. Chris and I knew each other better than anyone else, which could be a double edged sword when you think about it, meaning we could finish each other's sentences or knew exactly what to say to get a rise out of the other. Christopher could make my blood boil unlike any other person, but he could also make me laugh when I needed it and knew what to say to make me feel better. I could never stay mad at him long.
From being competitive with each other when we were little playing t-ball or to my endless number of school shirts with his number on them ( yes, sixteen years later and I still have those shirts) screaming like a mad woman from the stands at his football and baseball games. From our wrestling with each other in his living room floor to each of us ready to fight anyone else that said a bad word about the other. Riding in his mom's truck to school to riding with each other and my praying to make it there in one piece when he drove. Ha ha ha. From him being my ear when I had trouble with a boyfriend to him sitting by my bed the whole time I was in labor with my daughter until he suggested that we had reached the parts of the event that stretched the friendship boundary, ha ha ha. We went from him helping me up when I fell on the playground at school to him holding me on the floor and letting me fall apart when my papaw died.
Yes, life happens we all have different paths we have to follow and most of us follow all the wrong ones before we end up on the right one. Chris and I may have grown apart but I know that I could call him right now if I needed him and he would come to me. He is my childhood, some of my best memories include our times together and the majority of my funniest high school memories include him.
Watching my daughter today, who is so much like her mother it's scary, I was able to look back on some memories I hadn't thought about in a long time. I can close my eyes and see us plain as day in his jeep going to school, sitting in the stands at his baseball games, Chinese fire drills in the park, dancing at prom as an inside joke, Kid Rock music played way too loud, hide and go seek in the neighborhood....I could go on and on.
Today during my stroll down memory lane it occurred to me how important the friendships you make early in life really are. Not that friends made in college or in adulthood aren't great, they are, I have some awesome friends that I would be lost without that I have made late in life. It's just those friends who stand by you earliest in life at more than likely your most awkward stages, they're special and regardless of where you end up or even if you've traveled completely different roads you can always look back and smile. You'll always be bonded, you'll always have childhood.
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