Merry Sunshine

As I wrote before, at age 13, my family moved to North Sawyer Avenue in Chicago. I hated every minute of it. I hated our new home, I hated our tiny back yard, and I hated my new school. As an 8th grader from a proper middle school in Evanston, I did not appreciate this K-8 business at the new school. I did not want to have recess with first graders. Heck, I did not want to have RECESS at all! To add insult to injury, students did not eat lunch at this institution. You walked home for lunch, thus eliminating a big social component. Not that it mattered much because I felt like there wasn’t a single person I could relate to and that they had prejudged me as a stuck up girl from the suburbs anyway. Probably this was a bit true, and honestly, I did my fair share of prejudging as well.

So everything about my little life at that age felt completely out of my control and like one giant step backward. This frustration was of course punctuated by all the daily trekking back and forth four blocks to the stupid school. After about two weeks of my walking pity party, out of nowhere a girl, a fellow 8th grader I hadn’t noticed before, started walking home with me. She talked. I talked back. This continued until we got to my house and I asked this chick where she lived—right next door, a fact she already knew. Alisa and I have been walking together ever since.

Unlikely friends had become best friends very quickly. My bedroom window and her sister’s bedroom window were only separated by the gangway (about six feet) and we would hang out the windows and talk and talk until her sister demanded her room back so that she could blast Madonna’s Holiday. Then we would swipe my brother’s walkie-talkies when our parents (and Alisa’s sister) were irritated at the amount of phone time we spent. We would have secret celebrations in the gangway with Perrier water and full size bagel dogs her Bubby would buy. We were inseparable that year to the point that for a while her dad thought I was passing her drugs through the carefully folded up notes we’d exchange on pretty paper. We weren’t doing anything even remotely questionable, though, just being 13 year old girls talking and analyzing our way through life.

In what seemed like a cruel twist of fate, as quickly as I had been plucked from the suburbs and plopped in Chicago, Alisa was plucked from the city to the suburbs. Just days after our 8th grade graduation, their family moved a million miles away (or about 20) to Buffalo Grove.

It was heartbreaking to think that we would be separated. However, through high school, college, her graduate school, deaths, marriages, births, oceans and way beyond, distance has been the only negative thing ever between us since 1984.

I could never adequately articulate what this relationship or what this woman means to me except to say that one gray day Alisa chose to walk beside me and the glorious, merry sunshine came out. Thank G_D she didn’t run.