That song was the first Girl Scout song I learned as a Brownie.<\/p>\n
Make new friends but keep the old<\/em><\/p>\n One is silver and the other gold.<\/em><\/p>\n Under the direction of our leaders, Rose Bennett and Laverne Williams who remained our leaders from Brownies on through Senior Scouts, we sang that song as a round.\u00a0 And I\u2019m humming it today as we fly cross country from Seattle to Florida on our way to the Tampa Bay Festival of Reading where I\u2019ll be doing an event with Janis Ian and hopefully making some new friends and readers among the attendees at the festival<\/p>\n But it\u2019s also a weekend to connect with friends\u2014one who has been a friend for ten plus years now and the other for sixty plus.<\/p>\n Since I\u2019m doing an event with Janis, let\u2019s start there.\u00a0 Janis Ian has long been one of my favorite singers.\u00a0 During a particularly dark time in my life, her music sustained me.\u00a0 I drove from insurance appointment to insurance appointment listening to and singing along with her often heart wrenching lyrics.\u00a0\u00a0 If I happened to have access to a cassette tape player at the moment and popped one of her cassettes into the machine, I know my head would be tuned up and know exactly which track follows which track.\u00a0 Bright Lights and Promises, Jesse, Come Home, Society\u2019s Child, In the Winter, Would You Like to Learn to Sing?, and of course, at the very top of that list, her iconic At Seventeen.<\/p>\n Age seventeen wasn\u2019t a good time in my life.\u00a0 I came from a large family with pretty humble roots.\u00a0 I was tall, wore glasses, and was smart, a socially unacceptable combination that caused all available boys to avoid me like the plague.\u00a0 When the senior class handed out ballots for the \u201cgirl most likely to succeed\u201d at Bisbee High School, you can bet my name wasn\u2019t on it.\u00a0 I was, in a word, an outsider, which is good if you want to be a writer but which is pretty much hell on earth when you\u2019re seventeen and wanting to fit in.<\/p>\n When I heard Janis Ian\u2019s song for the first time, I recognized the story all too well.\u00a0 It was a song written by another outsider, someone just like me.\u00a0 My first thought was that she and I had, as they said on the reservation, walked in the same moccasins.\u00a0 Much later, when I learned that she\u2019s four-ten to my six-one, I realized that the moccasin thing just wasn\u2019t happening.\u00a0 But that song continued to resonate in my heart, and once I started doing book signing presentations, I often closed by performing that song. It turns out a lot of people\u2014both men and women\u2014had a tough time at that vulnerable age, and when I sing that song, I see the nods from people who are all too familiar with that reality.\u00a0 And when I finish singing there\u2019s usually more than one pair of damp eyes in the house.<\/p>\n Then, in 2008, through a series of coincidences\u2014including my singing At Seventeen at a writer\u2019s conference in Boise, Idaho,, Janis Ian and I struck up a friendship\u2014first through e-mail correspondence and later on in person.\u00a0 And that\u2019s what we\u2019ll be celebrating in our presentation at the festival\u2014how two outsider girls from very different backgrounds managed to grow up to live their dreams.\u00a0 Because, as it says in the song:\u00a0 Dreams are all they gave for free, to ugly duckling girls like me.\u00a0 And just like US!!<\/p>\n So that\u2019s the ten plus year friendship.\u00a0 The other friend I\u2019ll be seeing this weekend, after the festival, is Pat McAdams Hall, my friend from fourth grade on.\u00a0 We lived on Yuma Trail in Bisbee.\u00a0 Pat\u2019s family lived on Campbell Avenue, but the geography was such that by taking a short cut through Mrs. Corbett\u2019s yard and crossing Cole Avenue, their back door was less than a block from ours.<\/p>\n There were seven kids in our family and only two in theirs\u2014Pat and her younger brother, Ted. In our two bedroom house, the kids\u2019 bedroom had us stacked in like cord wood.\u00a0 At Pat\u2019s house, she and Ted both had their own individual rooms.\u00a0 We spent hours stretched out on the carpeted floor in her bedroom playing with paper dolls in total privacy.\u00a0 (Believe me, my mother never would have allowed paper dolls at our house!) And that\u2019s one of the wonderful things about truly old friends.\u00a0 They know where all those bodies are buried, and that\u2019s why, last year for my birthday, Pat gave me my very own set of Queen Elizabeth Coronation Paper Dolls\u2014the same set we had played with a lifetime ago.<\/p>\n We both loved reading.\u00a0 She favored the Bobbsey Twins.\u00a0 I was into Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.\u00a0 Pat was adept at Jacks; I was not.\u00a0 Together we gave our fifth grade teacher, Miss Stammer, fits, passing notes back and for with a clothes hanger and eating garlic pickles on our way back to school after lunch.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure we reeked.\u00a0 We survived seventh and eighth grade where we were doomed to sit in the auditorium for hours at a time, required to watch every single game of the world series from beginning to end on a black-and-white console television set positioned on the stage.\u00a0 No reading was allowed.\u00a0 We were expected to keep score.\u00a0 I came away with a lifelong dislike of anything baseball, and I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if Pat felt the same way.<\/p>\n In high school, we signed up for a journalism class in our junior year, and while we were seniors, served as co-editors of the school newspaper, the Copper Chronicle.\u00a0 We went on to school and were both the first of our separate families to graduate from college.<\/p>\n While I was out marching around in the hotel hallway, getting my steps, I was thinking about Pat\u2019s father, and since this is Veteran\u2019s Day it\u2019s only right to do so.\u00a0 Growing up, I was scared to death of Mac McAdams.\u00a0 He was a gruff man, who seldom spoke when I was around and almost never smiled.\u00a0 Then, one day, when I was a senior, I happened to walk through the living room while he was talking baby talk to their parakeet.\u00a0 I could never be quite as scared of him again.<\/p>\n It was only years after Mac was gone, when Thelma told us that, during World War II, he was D-Day + 1 and lived through the Battle of the Bulge.\u00a0 I\u2019ll never forget what she said.\u00a0 \u201cThe man who went away to war wasn\u2019t the same man who came back home.\u201d\u00a0 Let\u2019s remember that this weekend.\u00a0 He, like literally millions of others, have come back home from those horrors and lived their lives in quiet dignity and honor.\u00a0 And then there are the ones who never came home at all.<\/p>\n In the intervening years and despite living sometimes on separate continents and sometimes on opposite ends of the same one–Washington State and Florida\u2014Pat and I have managed to stay in touch.\u00a0 We\u2019ve seen one another through marriages and divorces; we\u2019ve watched each other\u2019s kids grow up; we\u2019ve helped one another through the losses of both parents and siblings.\u00a0 So yes, we\u2019ve shared a lot.\u00a0 And this Sunday, we\u2019ll be sharing an afternoon.<\/p>\n So I guess that\u2019s the point of this message.\u00a0 If you\u2019re lucky enough to have good friends, remember to treasure them.\u00a0 They\u2019re silver and gold all right, and they pay way more dividends than anything you\u2019ll get from the bank.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" That song was the first Girl Scout song I learned as a Brownie. Make new friends but keep the old One is silver and the other gold. Under the direction of our leaders, Rose Bennett and Laverne Williams who remained our leaders from Brownies on through Senior Scouts, we sang that song as a round.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-o4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1492"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1493,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1492\/revisions\/1493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}