That’s one of the first songs I learned when I started in Brownies as a first grader:

Make new friends but keep the old

One is silver and the other gold.

Pat McAdams Hall, one of those gold friends, came to visit this week.  The McAdams family moved to Bisbee the year Pat and I were both in fourth grade.  By the time her dad, “Mac” McAdams went to work in the mines, my father had quit Phelps Dodge and launched companies of his own, the Warren Construction Company and Warren Redimix.  

Pat’s house was less than a block from ours on Yuma Trail, but to get there you had to go down the passage between our fence and Mr. Corbett’s garage, through the Corbett’s yard, across Cole Avenue, past Harriet Smith’s house, and then into the McAdams’s carport.  Because I once saw a rattlesnake in the western portion of our yard, walking past Mr. Corbett’s garage, especially at night, was always a breath-holding experience.

Pat and I became instant best friends and were pals all through grade school and high school.  There were seven kids in our family.  There were only two in hers, Pat and her younger brother, Ted.  She had a bedroom all to herself, and we spent hours playing with paper dolls on the floor of that bedroom.  This was long enough ago that one of those sets of paper dolls was devoted to Queen Elizabeth’s coronation.  (A couple of years ago, Pat tracked down one of those sets on E-bay and gave it to me for my birthday!)

At Bisbee High we were in many classes together and in band as well.  As juniors we were in Rachel Riggins’s Journalism class, and as seniors we were co-editors of the school paper, the Copper Chronicle.

When it came time for college, she went to NAU in Flagstaff while I attended the University of Arizona in Tucson.  We saw each other through first boyfriends and first and second marriages.  We worked our way through divorces together and saw the births of both kids and grandkids.  And we shared the tragedy when, years apart, we both lost younger brothers. When it comes to tough times, she and I both know where all the bodies are buried.

In other words, we had a lot to talk about this week–mulling over old times, appreciating the way our parents raised us, reminiscing about the teachers we mistreated and the kids from our class who died before making it to their 21st birthdays.  We also had plenty to say about the “old codgers” like us who are still around to remember “way back when.  

We’re both over seventy years old.  We’ve been friends for more than sixty of those years.  We had a lot to talk about and it was great fun.

Thanks for coming, Pat, but I don’t envy your going home.  Returning to Florida in the dead of August won’t be a walk in the park, and I don’t think I could do it.