Friday, March 13, 2009

My friend is 50!

A life long friend of mine had her 50th birthday this week. Some people come and go, and some seem to become a permanent part of your life. My early memories of her are of us playing together on my Grandma Johnson's living room floor. Grandma Johnson was a sewer and a quilter, and she had made us some matching outfits out of scraps that were cuter than anything you could buy at the store. In fact, I remember my Grandma made her the sweetest bedspread for her canopy bed out of pink gingham.

She was physically much more mature than I, with an early onset of curves and a tiny little waste that most grown women would die for. As we got older she had a ridiculous crush on this scrawny guy with a gelmet. Seriously, the guy had no balls at all. I never really knew what she saw in him with his early 70's spandex outfits. She had a little sister who was as flat as a pancake and it was always funny to see the two of them side by side. Nobody ever said life was fair.

It was her pink convertible that I was most jealous of. Long before I could drive she was jetting around with the top down, stopping at her dream house only long enough to change into yet another sparkly set of clothes before heading out to another party or tennis match. OK, I was also jealous of those tiny feet that slipped so easily into impossibly high heals while I skipped along in my Keds.

That woman never seems to age either. By the time my own children came along, she was just as slim and curvaceous as always, but with even better hair and a darker tan. Some people warned me not to let my impressionable young daughters associate with her. After all, with her impossibly perfect face and figure, she might somehow send them the message that they weren't good enough - that all women were supposed to look like her. But I ignored the warnings, and I think my daughters turned out just fine. I hope to someday introduce my granddaughters to this fabulous, ageless friend.

I recently came across some picture of what she looked like when we first met. Seriously, we should all be so lucky to age as well.

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