A High School Memory

 

It was, most everybody said, an unusual and highly unlikely friendship.

Dawn was a golden girl, a child of wealth and privilege, gifted with more beauty than brains but with a good heart and an unexpectedly strict sense of fair play. She was more at home on the tennis court than the classroom and she stood her ground fiercely when it came to choosing her high school, refusing the private venues her parents had selected and opting for a public one. What’s more, she wouldn’t even consider using the family’s driver. She would ride the transit bus, same as 99% of her classmates, spring and winter weather notwithstanding. When the school choir needed a soloist, it was always Dawn they turned to, the rest of us were just backup singers. She and I had known each other for years as both our families attended the First Baptist Church and we’d been friends since junior high. Despite her background and upbringing, despite her blonde hair and fair peach skin, despite how easily everything (except a high GPA) came to her, you got used to her genuine smile and easy manner and how she treated everyone as equals. It was impossible not to like her.

June was the daughter of immigrants who lived perilously close to the sleazy side of Cambridge in a triple decker on a poorly lit and neglected side street. She was tall and slim, dark haired and olive skinned with an athletic build and a competitive spirit that made her perfect for the high school basketball team. We’d known each other since elementary school, had done projects together and played on the same Philadelphia Kick Ball and softball teams. In fifth grade, we were the only two girls to pass on the ballroom dancing class in favor of field hockey. Her family, loud and rambunctious and generous, welcomed me with open arms, genuine affection and always full plates of pasta and hot buttered garlic bread. We’d been choir mates since junior high and shared a love of music and cheap romance magazines. In sixth grade, I helped her with English classes, she helped me with math and somehow or other, we both managed to pass Conversational French.

The three of us came together in our first year of high school. We didn’t know it then but June would be Dawn’s first serious competition for the role of primary soloist for the choir. We more or less expected some resentment or jealousy from Dawn but that sense of fairness got in her way and she opted for sharing the spotlight. The choir had one of it’s best seasons in years.

As so often happens, the closeness we had in high school didn’t last after graduation and we lost touch. Rumor had it that Dawn had gone on to finishing school and then to two or three failed marriages and then to a quiet and well funded retirement condo in Daytona Beach. June got a scholarship to Northeastern, played four years of basketball as a star forward, graduated with honors and married a ROTC candidate. Several years later, I heard that she and her husband had renovated the old triple decker and become active in the gentrification movement of her old neighborhood but I never knew about either of them for sure. Sometimes, people, even good friends, come and go in our lives like the weather. You have to appreciate the fair, get through the foul, and be grateful for both. Everybody we come across is a lesson.