What a journey this
has been to finding the right relationship to examine for this prompt. I went
through yearbooks, scrapbooks, and photo albums, mulling things over, looking
at things from different angles. Lo and behold, I realized some things that had
never quite come together in my head before. Thank you, Laurie, for this prompt
which shined a light on something I needed to know.
The One Who Knows
All the things you
treasure most will be the hardest won.
I will watch you
struggle long before the answers come.
But I won’t make it
harder, I’ll be there to cheer you on,
I’ll shine the light
that guides you down the road you’re walking on.
(Dar Williams)
In 1960’s, Saint Joseph Academy (Joe's) drew from all the
Catholic schools around the west side Cleveland area. As a child, I had
attended St. Mark’s School in Cleveland, before moving to North Olmsted and
going to St. Richard’s. I had also spent several weeks in the summers going to
CYO Day Camp where I met many girls from other schools, most notably Our Lady
of Angels, a school right down the street from Joe's.
When I arrived on the campus in 1969, having taken public
transportation from the suburb, I was fortunate to know girls from the schools
and camps I had attended. (Reminds me of Laurie and her theory of Helen and the
Six Degrees of Separation). Though I knew many people, I formed a close kinship with
three girls: Kate, Mary Kay, and Laura.
I knew Kate the best coming in. I knew little about Laura – she attached
to us because of the St. Richard’s connection. Every day we would take the bus
together to school, eat together at the same lunch table, and meet after school
to walk a half a mile back to the public bus stop to get home.
Kate and I started out nearly inseparable. We wrote poetry
and letters to each other, went to dances at the local boy’s high school, and
kept in touch over the summer. Kate, like me, was the oldest girl in her
family. But unlike me, her parents were raging alcoholics, and she took the
brunt of her mother’s wrath at all times.
By sophomore year, I found myself hanging out with Mary Kay
more. Football games and performing in our church musical, she and I were
together all the time. Mary Kay
was the youngest in her family, and the only one left at home. Her take on life
was a lot more carefree, often mocking others and just wanting to have fun.
While I analyzed the lyrics of Joni Mitchell songs (a Kate activity), Mary Kay
would be doing the funky chicken to “I Feel the Earth Move” -- also something I liked to do. I guess what I’ve come to understand is
that I was a midpoint between these two.
Mary Kay and I were fanatics about passing notes to each
other in between classes. For a long time I had a brown paper grocery bag full
of these notes in my closet at home. Several notes passed between us during the
day, and I saved every one for a long time. They were full of craziness,
complaints, making fun of stupid things people were doing, and general
nonsense. At one point we even had
look alike navy wool pea coats, her’s with a Tweety Bird patch, and mine with
Speedy Gonzalez. We affectionately referred to each other by Tweety and Speedy.
Meanwhile Laura, the oldest in her family, had stable family
life. She was the oldest, with a younger brother and sister. She lived in a small
house and could walk right out of her backyard onto the campus of North Olmsted
High School. Across the street lived a boy named Bruce Hudson who would later
become famous for (sadly) going down on the Edmund
Fitzgerald.
 |
| Laura in her dad's pajamas at our Junior retreat 1971 |
Laura was like me in that she had neighborhood friends. I had Becky, Debbie, and Cheryl. She had Diana and Paula. She had a
great sense of humor, was artistic, and had a guinea pig named
Snickelfritz. She was the first
true animal lover I knew. Laura
didn’t get into passing notes at school, and she didn’t hang out much at
football games, dances, or many of the other things we might do on a Friday
night. Instead, she hung close to
home and her neighborhood friends.
During our high school years, I dated a guy named Chuck for
a short time. Eventually he got to know Laura, and they dated for about a
year. In a similar circumstance,
Kate had dated a guy named Jim for about a year, and then broke up with him.
Soon after he began to “go steady” with Mary Kay, but kept seeing Kate on the
sly. This put me in a position of knowing what was happening, and unable to say
anything about it. Mary Kay was
extremely jealous of Kate (maybe rightfully so), and this would come to a head
in the summer before senior year.
In August 1972, Kate’s mom kicked her out for good, and she
went to live with her grandmother. This meant Kate was no longer riding the bus
with us, and a sort of separation began. She also tended to get more heavily
into drugs, and this caused a bit of a barrier. On top of that, in that same month Jim told Kate that Mary
Kay was pregnant. Kate called and
told me. I waited, but never heard
the word from Mary Kay, even though we had spent a good part of the summer
together hanging out, going to shows with our dates, dancing at a local club,
swimming at her pool, even biking several miles to Jim’s house one night.
Who did Mary Kay tell?
Laura. This is the person she turned to that August, even though she
probably hadn’t spent any time with Laura that summer.
Eventually the only thing she would say to me was, “I know
you heard.”
Given the time period, and Mary Kay’s very Catholic parents,
it was decided she would withdraw from school and marry Jim – which she
did. And after that she fell out
of our lives. Phone calls to her new apartment went unanswered, or she didn’t
have much to say and would get off the phone quickly. (It was an abusive
situation, but we weren’t too knowledgeable about those things back then.)
With Kate distanced and Mary Kay gone, I developed a deeper
connection to Laura. We were both left riding the bus together and discovering
a friendship that had been a bit hidden before. To be clear, I was friends with many others, and our lunch
table stayed full of people. It was just that the core group had changed.
Time wore on. We graduated. That fall I got a job at Ponderosa Steak House. My boss told me they were looking for
someone else for the day shift, so I called Laura. Soon we were
working together. What was nice
was that she was so trustworthy – I didn’t have to worry about recommending her
for a job. I knew she had a great
work ethic.
Even after we no longer worked together, Laura stayed in my
life through annual birthday cards and Christmas cards. When I moved into an apartment
and threw parties, I always invited her. I think we went to a concert once or
twice. In 1979, she married into a large, prominent, very Catholic North Olmsted
family, and she asked me to be one of the nine bridesmaids. Turns out she had a whole cache of
friends I knew nothing about!
She and her new husband bought an old farmhouse in North
Ridgeville, a farming community turning into a regular suburb, and she put in
huge gardens. After Ponderosa she
worked for while developing photos, before becoming a bank teller – a job she
still has to this day.
In 1985 Laura had her son, Nick, and a few years later had
to divorce her husband in an unpopular move. What she had to do was stay true
to herself. She was not being treated right, and in her always grounded state
of mind, knew she had to make a change.
She continued as a single mom, tending her gardens and her dogs, working
at the bank, installing her own carpet, and living a minimalist lifestyle long
before it was popular.
 |
| Laura, Chuck, and me 1994 |
In 1994, our class had its 21st reunion, and
Laura surprised us all by bringing Chuck to the dinner. In 2003 when I was
visiting Ohio from Florida, my sister and I went to Laura’s for a cookout. Her sister Tina was there, as well as
some other people we knew. By then Laura had married a man named Jeff. What I
remember most about that night is that we talked and laughed so much, I still
can hear the echoes of our laughter to this day. That July night remains one of
the most enjoyable evenings of my life.
 |
| Jeff, Laura, her dog and gorgeous gardens 2003 |
Since that day, I’ve only seen Laura two more times: once in
2012, and again in 2016. Both times it was through a Joe's reunion when I was in
town. In 2012, about 40 of us
gathered at a restaurant on a Sunday afternoon to catch up. In 2016, it was a breakfast with about
10 people. That year I was staying with my mom, and she had dropped me off at
the restaurant before going to the Senior Center. Laura had agreed to bring me
home.
 |
| Mary Kay, Me, Laura 2012 |
After the breakfast, she drove me home and we sat in her truck for a long time
talking about stuff. Laura is one of those friends I can pick up with as if we had not been apart for years. I had just come off a very rough school year and a bout of
shingles, and we were talking about that. I mentioned that I try to help my
students discover who they are and encourage their strengths, since I don’t
feel I got much of that as a young person. Laura smiled and said, “But, Helen, I told you in high
school that you should be a teacher.”
I was dumbfounded.
In that moment, I seriously did not recall that AT ALL.
Yet, I believed her.
Yet, I believed her.
I could not get it out of my mind. And then one day, maybe a
few days later, I remembered.
It was probably March or April of sophomore year. We had gotten
off the bus on the way home to go to Great Northern Shopping Center – probably
because I had money to buy a new record album, and wanted to make my
purchase. We were walking back
across the parking lot to get the bus home, and were talking about the class
schedules were making for next year. I told Laura that I was signing up for
secretarial stuff since I wasn’t going to go to college. Laura said, “You should go to college.
You could be a teacher.”
I scoffed, “No way I’m going to college. I could barely pass
algebra. I’ll never pass geometry.” I probably added on, “Besides, it’s more
important for my brothers to go to college.” (True belief.)
I had such a wall up around the thought of college, not even my
insightful friend could break through it.
For three years I have never forgotten that valuable
conversation. And through the process of thinking about high school
relationships, it has finally struck me to the core that my best relationship
was not with Kate or Mary Kay as I’ve always thought. Laura was the real friendship – the one that saw me for who
I am, the one who tried to nudge me in that direction, the one that was never
critical or goofy or doing bizarre things or turning her back on me. She has
always, always, always been there.
Today while getting a massage I was thinking about this
essay, and the title of a Dar Williams song came to mind: “The One Who Knows.” The song is actually a parent singing
to a child, but I think of some of the lyrics as relating to Laura to me. In the 1970’s in some ways we had to
parent each other. Our parents
weren’t much like parents today. No one in my family ever told me I could be a
teacher. But Laura – dear amazing Laura --she was the one who knew.
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