Who was your best childhood friend?
Feet on the beach
Photo by: C. Mercado
David always asks these questions that make me think. I struggled with this for a bit before it hit me.
When I was little, my best friend was a girl named Lynn. She was my neighbour. Her family and mine were friends, our mothers taught in the same university, and we grew up together. We literally lived across each other, the distance between our houses a mere 20 meters, and we used to have a lot of fun when were were children. We were also related by affinity. Her father is the sister of my uncle's wife, my uncle being my mother's younger brother.
Lynn had three brothers, two older and one younger. At that time, she was the only girl. Lynn's father was very strict. She was not allowed out after 5 pm (well, so were we, but our parents were a little less hard on us), and she would not even be allowed to peek out the window, especially during school days. But she was a very good girl, and she obeyed without question.
But when we were together, we had so much fun! When her father was not home, we could come to her room and play, and our favourite game used to be "house", where we pretended we were parents, had children, cooked for them and looked after them. As children, this was our way of trying to figure out how real life was. But of course, we were just acting out how our own parents behaved towards us, because that is what we knew.
We would also bring out our cooking sets, cut out leaves and flowers and play cooks. One time when I was about 9 years old, I took out some wood and did some carpentry work and made a wobbly table. This became our little play table for a while, until it fell apart.
Despite being in a small city, Lynn and I went to different schools, so the time we would have together to play would be a little bit between getting home, washing up, homework and dinner, and the weekends. I remember our nightly routine. We would both go home after playing a bit, then after we had washed up, we would both look out our windows and shout at each other across the lane, and show off our nice pajamas! I remember having fun doing that. Little girls loved cute and fancy jammies, and we were no different.
Lynn and I used to share stories about boys, our first crushes, and we would go to the movies together with Marie, an older girl who was also a neighbour. We also took piano lessons together. Their family had a piano while we did not, so the teacher would come on the weekends to her house, and we would take turns with our lessons.
Our playground was the small compound where we lived, made up of not more than ten houses, all of them owned by professors at the university my mother taught in. It also went beyond that, to the grassy coconut grove behind our houses where old fox holes left over from the Second World War were still there. The tall grass often served as hiding places for us kids when we played games. We were outdoors most of the time, and would even climb trees and chase the neighbours' chickens!
While there were also other kids in this place, Lynn and I were the two girls closest in age, and we just bonded.
I cannot remember exactly when it was and how old we were, but I guess it was just the year we turned 10, Lynn's family moved to the big city. This was very traumatic for me since I felt I lost my best friend.
But we kept in touch, wrote letters to one another. They also ended up living in the same subdivision as my uncle, in Manila. Whenever I would come and visit during summer vacations, Lynn and I would carry on as if we were never apart. We were teenagers by this time, and we would take our bikes and just go off biking inside this much bigger compound and meet young boys, mostly friends of her brothers. After they moved, Lynn's mom had two more children, and this time she had another sister and another brother.
We remained friends through the years and saw each other as often as we could, until we finally and truly grew up. When my daughter Kristina was born, I made Lynn one of her god mothers.
But it has been awhile since I saw Lynn, or heard news about her. I was told by my cousin that she has two children, but has not ever married, and that one of her older brothers passed away some years back. I wonder how she is now, and how her whole family is.
David's weekend wandering made me miss her.
