A friend is someone who likes you.
It can be a boy…
It can be a girl…
(From: A Friend is Someone Who Likes You, by Joan Walsh Anglund, 1983)
This past Friday, I began another ten-week expressive writing series at Moores UCSD Cancer Center here in San Diego. We were delayed in our start to the session since the workshop was held in a different room than we’ve previously met in—and finding it was a bit of a challenge for all of us. But the late arrivals were punctuated with laughter and hellos, many participants returning for another series. The first session is a time typically to get acquainted and together, begin to explore the experience of cancer. But I couldn’t help notice the warmth and affection present in the room. Writing, out of the shared experience of cancer, builds community and creates friendships between many of the participants. So many of the men and women I write with tell me that cancer meant discovering who, among all those they called “friends,” were truly friends, people who stuck by them and offered care, love and support.
“But you got to have friends,” Bette Midler sang on her album, The Divine Miss M, “The feeling’s oh so strong. /You got to have friends/ to make that day last long…” As we closed the session later that morning, I presented everyone with a small chocolate hearts and a short exercise to use “valentines” as the writing prompt for our final exercise. A few wrote short poems; others wrote love letters to their spouses; some wrote about gratitude for the friends in their lives.
I thought about several of my friends over the years, but it was the photograph of my granddaughter, Flora, and her very best friend from pre-school, spending their Valentine’s Day together that got me remembering my first very best friend.
The obvious delight each girl has for the other in the other radiates in their smiles and faces. They’re each wearing a “princess” dress and enacting fantasies of Elsa, the snow queen from Frozen. I thought about their unabashed excitement—and of mine for a long ago friend when I was in kindergarten.
My very best friend in kindergarten was also named Sharon. We did everything together. Even in the class photograph, we sit together in the front row, she with short hair and long brown bangs, me with my then blonde hair in braids wrapped around my head. I was enamored of Sharon, and she of me, but on Valentine’s Day, my affection for her was more than apparent to everyone.
The day before the Valentine’s party, we were buzzing with excitement in Mrs. Newton’s afternoon class. Not only were we going to have a party, but for the very first time in our lives, we were exchanging Valentine’s cards. We each decorated paper bags to hold our cards, decorating them in red and white construction paper, and pasting cut-out red hearts on them. Our teacher was in charge of our class mailbox—large enough to hold everyone’s valentines–and decorated in pink and red, the lid covered with lace doilies and red hearts. She sent us home with a list of everyone’s names, and our mothers went to the 5 & 10 store to buy the cellophane packages of 36 valentines, ready for addressing to our classmates, with some parental assistance, of course.
Early the morning of February 14, I tiptoed out of bed and made my way to the cardboard table in the front room of our apartment, where my package of valentines lay waiting. A blue ink pen was nearby. Very carefully, I opened the package and quietly began addressing each card in my best printing: “To Sharon H.,” I wrote, then misspelling a word, “Form Sharon B.” Not just once, but over and over, one one card after the other. By the time my mother awakened, I had addressed well over half of the cards and each to my best friend, Sharon. Worse, I had done it all in ink.
I don’t remember how Mother got me off to school with some kind of hastily manufactured valentines in my bag so I had something for everyone on the list, but the memory of Mrs. Newton passing out valentines that afternoon has stayed with me. Again and again, she reached in the big pink box, looked over at me, then smiling turned to the class and said, “Why, here’s another valentine for Sharon H.” I blushed furiously each time.
Sharon and I we grew apart by the time we entered high school. Each of us had other best friends, some who endured; some who did not, but by graduation, our sites were on college and getting out of our small town. Sharon married her high school sweetheart, but became terribly ill soon afterward and died —the details of her death I no longer remember. But I do remember how important she was to me those many years ago as my first best friend. From her I learned something about what it meant to have a special friend. There would be other lessons to come on friendships, as we grew into adolescence and adulthood, some difficult, others heartwarming. I think some friendships are meant to last decades. Some are not. Time, circumstance, unforeseen difficulties, distance—all intervene and challenge our friendships, yet each is important. From them we learn more about ourselves and each other.
As I look at my life now, I’m grateful for the friendships that have continued despite years and the physical distances between us. “Make new friends, but keep the old,” an old Brownie Scout song goes, “one is silver and the other gold.” Each time we’ve moved—more than I like—it means leaving old friends and again, making new ones. The older we become, the more difficult making new ones seems to be, and yet “you got to have friends…”
Friendship, according to Rebecca Adams, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, has a bigger impact on our psychological well-being than our family relationships. Besides better health, a more positive outlook, a longer lifespan and a more hopeful attitude towards life are benefits of friendships.
Not convinced? Take a look at the New York Times article, “What Are Friends For? A Longer Life,” published April 20, 2009. One ten-year study of older people found those with a large circle of friends were less likely to die than those with fewer friends. Harvard researchers also found that strong social ties may promote brain health as we get older. There’s more. In a 2006 study of nurses with breast cancer, the women without close friends were four times as likely to die from it as those with ten or more friends. Proximity and amount of contact were not important; just having friends was protective. And In a six-year study of 736 Swedish men, friendships was more important in lowering the risk of heart attack and coronary heart disease than attachment to a single person.
Do you remember your first best friend? Write about your first friend or another special friend. What memories you retain about him or her, the importance they had in your life?
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