Maiden Names<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To Diana Conway from Judy Busk<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We were young girls together,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Eleven or twelve at most,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet our conversations soared to galaxies afar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We carried books by wagonload,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dug for fossils, climbed a rock or two<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And swore that they were mountains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We lost each other later in a maze<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of married names that easily removed all trace<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of those two friends together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think of you, Diana, and I know<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our paths must be in parallel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I only hope someday they\u2019ll cross again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
People who have read my book of poetry, After the Fire<\/em>, may remember the above poem and the story that went with it. The Conways came to Bisbee, Arizona, and moved into a house at the top of Yuma Trail, just up the street from ours, in the summer of 1955. The Conways had two kids\u2014a boy and a girl. Diana was a year older than I was, and her younger brother, Joey. was the same age as my younger brother, Arlan. Diana and I quickly bonded. We both loved reading, and we made weekly treks to the Greenway School Library\u2014which was open one day a week during the summers\u2014hauling books back and forth in our family\u2019s Radio Flyer wagon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mr. Conway had been hired as an announcer at the local radio station. Unfortunately, his new job lasted only two months. At the end of the summer they left town, moving on to California. After that Diana and I stayed in touch as pen-pals. The summer before I started high school, I took a train from Tucson to LA and spent a week with Diana and her family at their home in Sherman Oaks. We continued to correspond through college, but after that, we lost touch. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the early eighties I began looking for her\u2014to no avail. It was as though she had vanished into thin air, and that\u2019s when I wrote the poem, hoping that someone who knew Diana might read it and put us back in touch. That didn\u2019t happen, so a few years later, I tried again. While writing the first Walker Family book, Hour of the Hunter, <\/em>the main character was named Diana in honor of my long-ago friend, and part of the dedication said, \u201cand to Diana Conway, wherever she is.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eleven years later, that dedication paid off. While attending Left Coast Crime in Anchorage in 1991, I met a woman who said, \u201cWho\u2019s the Diana Conway in this book,\u201d she demanded holding up a copy of Hour of the Hunter, <\/em>open to the dedication page. \u201cI know someone named Diana Conway, and she lives right here in Anchorage. Minutes later, I was speaking on the phone\u2014well, blubbering rather than speaking\u2014to my long-lost friend. She had attended seventeen schools in the course of grade school and high school. I attended two. She was a bit taken aback because she hadn\u2019t been searching for me in the same way I had been searching for her. Just like that, our long-interrupted friendship was back on a penpal basis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It turns out, however, that Diana Conway wasn\u2019t the only one of my childhood friends who had disappeared into the ethers. Before the Conways moved into that house on Yuma Trail, another family lived there\u2014a large family, complete with seven kids, just like ours. We mostly paired off by age, and Donna and I became pals. They were Catholic, so the kids went to St. Pat\u2019s school in Bisbee rather than Greenway, but from kindergarten through third grade, Donna and I were thick as thieves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In Bisbee, Phelps Dodge was the major employer. Each summer, the company shut down the mines and everyone involved went on vacation. People who didn\u2019t have family members employed by PD stayed home during Shut Down. (By the way, the Busk kids made out like bandits watering lawns for people who were out of town.) In 1953 Donna\u2019s family went to California during Shut Down and never returned\u2014with no explanation. Like the Conways would do several years later, they simply vanished into the black hole of California. Just like that, my best friend Donna was gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since putting Diana\u2019s name in a book had finally given me back my one missing friend, when it came time to write Web of Evil<\/em>, Ali #2, I tried pulling the same stunt. I didn\u2019t put Donna\u2019s name in the book\u2014I used her brother\u2019s name for one of the characters, and guess what? It worked. Months later I received an email from someone who knew the brother. I wrote back to him, explaining the whole story and giving him my contact information in case Donna was interested in being in touch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Months later, Donna called me. We spoke on the phone for the better part of an hour. She explained that life in their household had been anything but perfect. Domestic violence wasn\u2019t something that was even hinted at in Bisbee, Arizona, in the fifties, but clearly it had existed in that household. When the family left on \u201cvacation\u201d during Shut Down that year, their mother loaded her kids into the car and set off for California with no intention of ever returning. For months she and her kids lived in a relative\u2019s garage somewhere in the LA area. Donna’s parents never divorced, and when her father was ill and dying, her mother took him back and cared for hm until his eventual passing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Donna grew up. Eventually she had returned to Arizona, living in the Phoenix area where she married and had a good job, achieving a level of stability in adulthood that had been absent from her childhood. During that phone call, she told me that it never occurred to her that she might have been a good enough friend that anyone would have been looking for her. So although she was complimented to know that I had searched for her, she had no interest in resuming our friendship. Remembering those \u201cold days\u201d was just too painful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve abided by her wishes, but this week, as I was re-reading Web of Evil<\/em>, I encountered her brother\u2019s name and all of this came back to me in a flash. Now I\u2019ve shared the story with you. Why? Because I\u2019m guessing I\u2019m not the only person my age who has lost and found friends. And the thing is, sometimes, when you find them again, the best thing to do is to let them go. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Maiden Names To Diana Conway from Judy Busk We were young girls together, Eleven or twelve at most, Yet our conversations soared to galaxies afar. We carried books by wagonload, Dug for fossils, climbed a rock or two And swore that they were mountains. We lost each other later in a maze Of married names […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_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},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[53,5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bisbee","category-family","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-Q0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3224","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=3224"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3225,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3224\/revisions\/3225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}