Mike smiled
It was toward the end of the ninth grade that Nancy Pearlman, and I became steadfast friends. Although, it was quite evident that she didn’t like me much, at first. She was pretty popular in the princess circle and was always giving me the snub. I had seen her around Le Conte summer school, the year before, at a time when she was wearing a body cast to improve her scoliosis. I don’t know how our friendship came about, except to say that eventually we found each other to be very jolly company. We just clicked, more than the others, in spite of ourselves. We’d laugh until, we couldn’t. We’d just look at each other and crack-up. And, I can’t say what it was that made the crowd like us together, either. We were the Bobbsey Twins, Lucy and Ethel, Tammy and Tommy, freckled and screwy, but she was shorter and brunette.
I would say, “May sheep’s heads grow on apple trees. . .”
And she would say, “May the moon be turned into green cheese. . .”
‘If ever I cease to love!’
We were true blue, together through thick and thin, trials and tribulations, marriages, divorces and I never had reason to think that we would ever come to an end. But, she was taken from this world at the tender age of forty six, a day before our weekly lunch. Her death devastated me, and I miss her, so very much.
‘May the Monument a hornpipe dance,
If ever I cease to love!’
School let out and it was summer once again. We had a riotous time of it, for the Kolodnys rented a home on Balboa Island for a month, and shared their bounty. What a fun time we had! What shenanigans we pulled. After that, Nancy and I spent the rest of the summer either body surfing or babysitting. That is, I would babysit and she would sit with me on the lawns of various homes. We’d watch the children play and share our thoughts and dreams.
"I don't know what I want to be, just yet, but I know that I want to make a difference." said Nancy.
"I think I want to be a writer and have five children . . . one more than my mother." I said to Nance, as I stood up and did stretches on the grass. “C'mon, let's practice the stomp.” Na, na na, na na! We worked on our “cool” all through the summer, readying ourselves for John Marshal High School. It was the fall of ’62 and we were going to make our world a perfect oyster.
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