friendship – Old Lady Writing

“Nothing that happens to us after we are twelve matters very much.” J.M. Barrie

I must preface the following with a disclaimer. I have told this story so often that I am pretty certain I have already written it, so if you have already heard or read it, please let me know (and like it anyway).

I was six years old when I cautioned myself to beware, for I was surrounded by people who were not smarter than me. It might have been a devastating realization to a child that young. Instead, it was an inspiration to rally and rely on myself—the old “trust but verify” (which is, in fact, a Russian proverb), minus the trust. I proceeded to have an eventful childhood full of hijinks, camaraderie, and a singular focus on defying authority. Almost half a century later, I stand by every shenanigan, and only wish I had made more mischief. “Forget regret or life is yours to miss”—Jonathan Larson was also right.

In some late years of the seemingly never-ending stagnation of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule, I was a Young Pioneer. Surrounded by like-minded and like-spirited delinquents-in-training, I vacillated between apathy and active defiance, usually settling on an attitude of passive aggression. My class of just under thirty pupils[1] was divided into three “links”, similar to a coed Cub Scout den without parents. In the most disorganized, wild, and irresponsible class, I predictably belonged to the laziest and most undisciplined link. There were eight of us, if memory serves, which included a core group of restless and adventurous girlfriends, and a couple of unpopular boys. To snatch defeat out of the jaws of any potential victory was almost a point of honor for me and my young comrades. To be fair, we usually started out doing what we were supposed to, and proceeded to fail in an epic manner. None illustrates this better than the one time we collected scrap metal. So unmitigated was this disaster that our entire school was banned from this time-honored activity for my remaining time back in the USSR.

The day of scrap metal collection, Link One and Three departed post haste in search thereof. We members of Link Two briefly lingered in class. Our Link Leader, an earnest, sweet girl who stood alone in our entire class as a follower of the prevailing ideology, made a short motivational speech along the lines of, do not attempt to evade your Young Pioneer duty. This motivated the rest of us to want to bail on the whole thing, but someone yelled “Construction”, and we rallied.

There used to be a small park next to my school with a couple of see-saws and slides. I used to come there on field trips with my daycare, and it was still there when I was in first grade. However, by the start of second grade, the little friendly playground was demolished and taken over by construction of the regional archives. Five years later, the site of the stalled construction was the school’s perpetual grim neighbor[2]. There was a crane which never seemed to move, and the more daring of us enjoyed crawling through the hole in the fence and all over what looked like the ruins of an old fortress[3].

And so of course construction (and we called it just that, as in “let’s go and find some metal at the construction”) became our first target. Several of us filed through the habitual hole in the fence, but were dismayed to find that the site was picked over. The better organized and more ideologically focused Links One and Three already raided it and carried off all the spare metal! As I say, my little gang was always a day late and a ruble short. We took a couple of abandoned hammers and managed to detach a piece of pipe we determined to be nonessential, but it was not nearly enough. (Surprisingly, no one thought to cut the fence down for scraps).

My school was located in a residential urban area, surrounded by apartment buildings. It was an older, more established area of the city, though not quite the prestigious historic center. Raiding the surrounding courtyards, we added a couple of unattended shovels and rakes to our bounty. It was a bit of a task to stop the boys from hitting each other with the shovels, but I do not recall any significant injuries during this escapade.

In one of the courtyards, we spotted a child playing with a toy metal wagon and attempted to negotiate surrender, but his vigilant grandma chased us off with a broom. We also kept losing link members with every encounter, kind of like when Three Musketeers started off for England in search of the queen’s diamonds. Getting distracted, losing interest, and entirely changing course was typical behavior for me and my friends during any school-sanctioned undertaking.

Still, five intrepid girls persevered, and fortune really smiled on us when we encountered a clearly abandoned metal bed frame in one of the courtyards—with wheels, and even a mattress to boot! Never questioning why a bed would be parked near an apartment building entrance, we immediately threw off the unnecessary ballast of a mattress, situated our rakes, shovels, and hammers on the springs, and proceeded to move the bed on out. It was a swift and stealthy getaway, several middle-schoolers in school uniforms[4] earnestly pushing a bed along a lively avenue. Some passers-by stared, some wondered, none dared to stop the purposeful Young Pioneers.

Not the image of that actual bed. It is surprising how a search for “metal bed with wheels” only comes up with images of hospital beds…

What should have been the long-sought success not just for our merry band of misfits but for the entire class went decidedly pear shaped, for the owners of the all this paraphernalia (neighbors in the process of moving, careless gardeners, construction supervisor) eventually found their way to our school and claimed their belongings. The worst part was that the bulk of our bounty, the bed and garden tools, was easily returned with apologies because—private property, so a “remnant of the past”, in the ideology of the times. It was the looting of the construction site—“plunder of state property”—that was the real offense, and our couple of hammers and the piece of nonessential pipe were the least of it. The more proactive students got there before us and in their zeal carried off everything that was not nailed down, and some things that were, including the nails themselves. I never got the opportunity to participate in collecting scrap metal again, but I will never forget our glorious entry into the school courtyard, riding on a bed, wielding a rake—Young Pioneer triumphant!

[1] In the Soviet Union, and I believe in today’s Russia as well, you moved from grade 1 to 8 with the same group of 30 or so students, took the same classes, and had the same teachers. In my school, there were 3 classes to a “parallel”. After grade 8, a third of the students who did not pass the high school entrance exams would go on to trade and vocational schools, and the rest were reshuffled into 2 classes. My school, which housed grades 1 to 10 (and later, the added 11^th grade), would graduate about 60 students from high school.

[2] First, not a uniquely Soviet issue. Second, when I visited in 2018, I saw the unimpressive final product. I did not even take a picture of it. (I found this on GoogleMaps)

[3] If this is not a classic example of “attractive nuisance”, I do not know what is. What we thought we were getting versus what we got (not actual photos).

[4] Brown woolen dresses with black aprons.

According to my recently unearthed diary (it was not missing or anything, I just do not like to refer to it too often because of the cringe factor), my teen years were full of seemingly perpetual anguish related to various betrayals which I would never recollect but for this traumatizing written record. I was, at times, surrounded by The Mean Girls—but who wasn’t in their teen years? But in a period of just three days recently, I interacted with a variety of people who, in various ways, reminded me how incredibly blessed I have been by friendships in this lifetime.

I auditioned for several parts in a show at the local community theater. I did not get cast for several reasons.
- First, for one of the characters, my Russian accent is no longer convincing. Yes, and I feel slightly stupid even writing this, but I am only identified as vaguely Eastern European to someone with a very good ear. There were literally women on that stage who sounded authentically foreign-born (and weren’t), while I was doing a desperate impression of Crazy Russian Hacker. And I am terrible enough with accents that I cannot just summon it.
- Second, the director decided that the part of a “wanna be lawyer” should be played by a man, because, well, lawyers are men. Triggering, and certainly nothing I have not heard from every corner over the past three decades, but for reasons passing understanding I always expect more parity from community theater. What an unlikely source of optimism! This actually reminds me of a time when I was not cast in another show. It was a dual part—Eastern European mother in her youth in Act I, and then her daughter, a lawyer, a couple of decades later, in Act II. The director called me and told me that I was believable as one but not as the other, and for the life of me I cannot remember which one was which. There is great irony somewhere here, but ultimately, I guess I would prefer to think that I am an implausible lawyer. Frankly, I usually feel that way anyway…
- But, my point in all of this is that I ran into two women I know at the audition. The camaraderie, the emotional support, the cheering each other on and complimenting each other even though we were up for the same couple of parts was absolutely lovely. I have not known either of these fine humans in my youth, so cannot tell with certainty if we are all improving with age or if I am meeting a better class of people. Perhaps a little bit of both, which is both sensible and hopeful.

Not to make it sound like my American youth was misspent in the friendship department, the following day I drove to Hell (a real town; I am not this inventive) for a “Still 50” party of a high school classmate I have never met before. Well, we met during a series of Zoom calls that were held on the regular during the darkest days of the pandemic, and encompassed a group of pals who all graduated within three years of each and now live all over not just the continental U.S., but as far as Hawaii. I count myself more than a little lucky to enjoy the company of almost a dozen folks who knew me at my utmost awkward, clueless, and, in my mother’s characterization, gloomy, and who still willingly interact with me going on forty years later.

The following day I had a lunch lasting several hours with a college friend. We have not seen each other in about a decade, which is a ridiculous and inexplicable gap, but there it is. The old saying of picking up where you leave off without missing a beat is always true with this friend, and has been for over thirty years. I often see people question if there can be genuine, non-romantic friendship between men and women, and this long-standing unshakeable bond between an introverted engineer/scientist and a [seemingly] extroverted lawyer/amateur thespian is a testament to the fact that friendship, like love, is a gift that you take where you find it.
And finally, there is my childhood BFF. She is the one whom I met on my first day of school, and who is the closest I have come to having a sister in this world (I have known my actual sister for a fraction of the time, both in quality and quantity—but that is another story for another time). We have lived world apart for over forty years, and have averaged one in-person meeting per decade during this time. Right now, she is on a road trip to the Russian Near North. From each scenic stop, she has been sending me daily videos, narrating the town histories, telling fun local facts, showing scenic views. They visited Novgorod the Great, Petrozavodsk the capital of Karelia, Murmansk above the Arctic Circle, stopped on the shores of the Barents Sea. I have felt included in this wonderful adventure. In return, I send videos of my foster dog. And beer. And my office. And I feel unbelievably fortunate that my first school friend is still my best friend. She is, and always will be, family.

The wisdom of the years taught me that not all friendships are for always. Some relationships are for a season, and every season has its ups and downs. Looking back, there have certainly been some downs. But, as the song goes, thank you for having been a friend (this is the Russian/Georgian version—not to be confused with the theme to “The Golden Girls”). The ups have, and continue to, fill this life with meaning, warmth, and laughter.