[I’m telling a follow-up Stuart, Florida, story and will return to New Smyrna Beach next week.]
The six of us peered into each other’s eyes, trying in short seconds to excavate the girls we’d known when we were sixteen from the fifty-six year old faces staring back at us. Then we flung ourselves into hugs. Wonder and words and laughter and very old trust sparklered across my Arizona lawn.
We’d found our safe place during adolescence on the sands of Stuart, Florida, and in each other.
On this balmy February 5, 2015, we bunched on the grass after landing in Phoenix from St. Louis, Atlanta, Hayden, Idaho; Greenville, South Carolina; and Punta Gorda, Florida, together for the first time since tenth grade.
For a year I’ve sat in the sanctuary of my office and mined a story a week from my murky memory. I painted scenes, picked perfect verbs, imparted emotional truth. I didn’t picture the three-month Facebook free-for-all that woke slumbering relationships along with recollections.
My two-and-a-half years in Stuart started at the tail end of fourteen as I fled my father’s strictures and flew under Mom’s radar.
Mom navigated her nursing career, new marriage, and my nine-year-old brother’s undiagnosed dyslexia.
These girls and a couple others kept my stupid to a minimum.
But in the melee of life—moving to new towns, matriculating, marriage, motherhood—I lost these crucial friends and they lost each other.
I wasn’t the only one who had found safety in our Stuart sisterhood. Denise Domansky’s family had bailed Delray Beach before we met because she’d gotten beaten up for being white. Mitzi had slept in Vietnam to
bombs rattling in her bedroom windows. Family members of Aida’s schoolmates in Colombia had been abducted. Tara’s mother had survived the beheading of her first husband. For Carolyn, overrun with brothers and missing her dad who captained big boats in the Merchant Marines, our sorority meant solace and fun.
Aida brought a red notebook stuffed with our junior high notes—some with snippets of her old bickering with Denise we’d almost forgotten. Now, we guffawed over the notes we’d signed with numbers instead of names in case they were intercepted. Aida out-remembered us all with stories and details we knew were true the minute she spoke. Denise’s brother, Mike, younger by seven years, drove from Vegas to see Denise and collect a hug–forty years late–from Aida, his boyhood crush.
This weekend, Denise finally got the slumber party at my house she’d missed all those years ago in Florida because she had to babysit. She called the trip her out-of-the-box weekend and hiked a mountain, tasted Thai and vegan fare, and let Carolyn commandeer her into 10,000 steps a day. Always our champion of doing the right thing, Denise segued this skill into parenting. Her dread-locked son, contemplating a step off the straight and narrow, slammed home after curfew one night, still innocent, because he’d heard Denise’s voice in his head.
Mitzi—the loveable Jesus freak of our youth—was another voice guiding our choices. She said we were the ones—none of us then particularly religious—who stuck by her when others called her too Jesus-y.
I credit Mitzi’s tenth grade prayers for pointing me to the faith that backboned my adult life.
Mitzi wished we didn’t remember every crazy thing she did back then, like bringing home ex-con Frank Costantino, whom she met on a criminology field trip, to spend the night with her family. Mitzi also accompanied the former mob member-
turned-Christian to Raiford Prison where she told inmates how their letters affected high school students.
Mitzi sent for college info from every Christian college in the country, determining to attend whichever university sent a packet, containing yellow paper, on October twelfth. When no mail arrived that day the girls tried their best not to rib her. Mitzi later landed at Oral Roberts University—via old fashioned prayer.
Carolyn, our voice of reason—then and now—coached Mitzi, Tara, and I in marketing our businesses. She cajoled us into playing Head’s Up on her phone and yelling seventies trivia at the top of our voices. She, along with Mitzi, played driver and helped me grill each girl about our disconnected years. She’d known—when I didn’t—that we “got” each other as teens because we’d both been divvied an extra helping of angst. And as adults, our affinity hangs on.
Giddy over escaping winter and too much work, Tara propelled us through the weekend with more words than we’d ever heard her utter. Tara grew up to be a psychotherapist, among other careers. She lay awake in bed on the nights before the reunion thinking up a game of questions. She snagged us with Bananagrams, then got us talking about virginity and regrets and boys we loved.
We continued to peel back the years while we hiked Sedona’s red rock, the ridge over Canyon Lake, and the marshes of the Riparian Reserve.
We discovered we’re monogamous, most of us making it with only one man. We’re moms who muscled our way to matriarch by going to college, carving careers. Like the rest of humanity, we earned maturity by the things we muddled through. One of us lost a long string of years to the control of a cult. Another was widowed at twenty-three. One took decades to dig the bliss from wedded bliss. One visited her child and her dreams in jail.
Before the weekend wound down, we comforted a daughter who landed in ER, did damage control when a demented parent detonated a family crisis, and welcomed a son who boomeranged home with a broken heart.
We’re Protestant, Catholic, Universalist, and free thinkers. We lean left and right. Today our relationships, like
our food, tend toward healthy. And somehow we learned to give back. Mitzi supports an orphanage. Carolyn gives money to the homeless because “Five dollars means more to them than to me. If they feel they need to spend it on liquor, that’s their call.” Denise contributes to her church. Tara and I mentor/mother younger women. Aida and her mom have humanitarian goals for their house in Peru.
We talk about getting together again, but we don’t know if life will short-circuit our good intentions. We don’t know whether we can sustain friendships flung across the country. We don’t know what this weekend will mean in the scope of our lives.
But we fell in love with each other all over again. We discovered the brief time we shared as kids counted. And we’re glad we took this chance to remember and say thank you.
[Today, Aida works with English as a second language elementary students. Tara owns a women’s consignment store. Denise is head of accounting in a large law firm. Mitzi owns Bali Sterling Silver. Carolyn does interactive website development and interactive marketing. Jane Miller, part of our girl posse, as well as Amy Kuhns, Terri Orino, Deb Thalasitis, were missed! ]
Other blogs about Stuart, Florida:
Kickball, Kicked in the Pants, and Kicking Back
Bridge Jumping and Junk Pile Regrets
The Wheels of the Swim Team Bus Go Round and Round
Fresca, the County Fair, and the Truth
Mary Jane, the Catholic Church, and Me
Swimming In Dad’s World-Class DNA
A Village, a Vamp, and a Muddied Soul
So happy for you and your girls! Love the photos!
Thanks, Suzan! We all felt such a sense of wonder the whole weekend.
What a marvelous reunion. So good to have a group stay together after so many hardships. It sounds so positive and refreshing. Congratulation to each of you (including those that could not be there) knowing each of you were together in spirit if not physically
.
Thanks, Nancy. It was truly a dream come true.
What an inspiring story Ann Lee Miller. Your words brought your reunion to life for me. I remember a few from your Martin County years. So glad to hear how you touched each others lives back then and had an opportunity to reconnect again. Thanks for sharing.
I’m so tickled you could imagine our weekend. It was surreal in the best way!
I enjoyed reading about your reunion. I recently got in touch with what is left of the group I knew in high school at NSB during my years there. My best friend, Sherry, married my first boyfriend while she was a junior, he went into the Navy. I never told her he had asked me a few days before he did her. I could not bring myself to do that to her. She was escaping a bad home life there. She dated the man I later married 2 weeks out of high school and later regretted time and time again. He beat me for any reason under the sun he could think of. It took me 10 years to climb up out of that, with little to no family support and two girls in tow. There were others in our group, one a Methodist ministers daughter, who was my maid of honor at my wedding and now lives in North Carolina, but got me started on facebook so we could catch up a few years back. Another friend, not of the group but my oldest bestie and I just recently reunited. We have been pals since 6th grade. But drifted apart after a few minor differences about husbands. She was also the older sister in my life that I so desperately needed as my childhood had been a nightmare. I escaped many times to her house for a dose of normal. She was the oldest of 5 siblings, her mom and dad wonderful. When I feel life crushing me down, she reminds me of who I am and how little I deserved all the abuse I suffered. She gets me to laugh and to see reality in clear terms. Your stories always evoke so much of my memory, Ann. I have a lot to say if I can just sort through it enough to start writing it into something useful. Thank you for being an inspiration, and for showing me there is a good world out there.
Bonnie, your story is beautiful because you have overcome! Thank you for sharing a bit of it. You will get the whole story out and will find healing in the process. This happens to me as I write.
You are so write. Its been almost two weeks of real healing because your stories triggered memories in me that helped me remember who I am. Your books offer real direction for young people in a lost and confusing world.
Wow, Bonnie! I’m so awed that my stories are ushering in healing for you. Since I write alone I forget that the process that is healing me sometimes helps other people too. Thanks for telling me.
it was wonderful to hear about your reunion! May God richly bless you and your friends from here on!
Thank you, Tracy!
Hey Ann, just want you to know how much I look forward to reading each and every one of your looks back in time. Truly “chicken soup for the soul” and nourishment for the heart – lonely or not. 🙂
Thanks for going on the journey with me, Jill. We had such a positive environment be live our teens in, it’s a pleasure to excavate those days.