Real friendship can validate our lives

St. Petersburg Times (Florida)

BEVERLY BECKHAM

I wanted to be Rosemary's friend from the moment I met her. I was 7 years old, the new girl in class, and Rosemary already had a best friend, Jean Sullivan, a girl she walked around the schoolyard with, a girl she invited over to her house. I tried to get Rosemary to like me better than she liked Jean, but I was unsuccessful. Then fate intervened, Jean moved and I got my wish.

We were best friends, real honest-to-goodness, I-like-you-better-than-anyone-else-in-the-whole-world best friends for at least six years. It seems longer; it seems that time dawdled back then. I remember a million lazy afternoons spent at Rosemary's, dressing and undressing our Ginny dolls, wallpapering an old chicken coop for a clubhouse, creating a kingdom in a puddle, floating leaves and tiny sticks across this miniature ocean, then willing ourselves tiny so that we could rule that Lilliputian land.

In memory, it seems we did rule.

In memory, I can taste the wind on my cheek.

Every inch of my childhood, every vivid moment, is full of Rosemary. We were two children who dreamed the same dreams, who played the same games. We organized talent shows, wrote a weekly newspaper, sat through every movie that was ever shown in Randolph Center, made scrapbooks of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, and sang Tammy together at the Policemen's Ball.

We were inseparable and would be forever.

In seventh grade, I transferred to Catholic school, so from Monday to Friday Rose and I didn't see each other. But every weekend we spent together. To affirm our friendship, to guarantee that it would last forever, that we would never change, that we would grow up and old together, we decided to become blood sisters.

In the woods behind the School for the Deaf, Rosemary pricked her finger with a sewing needle she'd taken from home. A tiny spot of blood stood up and waited to be mixed with mine. But I dropped the needle - on purpose because I was chicken - and promised "forever" without the blood.

Maybe the blood would have made a difference. In high school our friendship changed. We were at different schools, though just two miles apart. But it might as well have been a thousand. We talked on the phone and we still shared in each other's lives, but we weren't part of those lives. We had different friends, different teachers. We went to different football games. We lived in different worlds.

We made other friends - high school friends, boyfriends, college friends, adult friends. And we changed. We had to. We could not remain children forever.

Rosemary's and mine was a first friendship, a pure one that knew no boundaries, no inhibitions, that grew in the rich soil of mutual caring, proximity and the luxury of time. It was the basis for other friendships that have taken root in less fertile ground. For the adolescent, the student, the young woman, the mother, didn't have the time the child had.

Newer friendships had to step around boyfriends and term papers, had to defer to work and husband and children. Yet these friendships endured, despite different interests, despite demands of separate households and separate lives, despite the lack of shared blood and spoken vows.

Old friends, new friends, interim friends - all of them are part of our lives. Without them, who would we be? I wonder if any of us could bear the bad grades, the disappointments, the wounded hearts, the midnight feedings, the isolation of long winter days, without the support and the company of friends.

The problem is that we confine our sentiments to our families, that we profess our love only to our husbands and sweethearts. What about our friends?

How can we pass over the friend who stayed with us as we waited for test results; who watches our children when no one else will; who listens to our worries despite worries of her own.

Friendship is unheralded love. Even the word is generic, its meaning dependent on the adjective preceding it. He's a casual friend. He's my best friend. But friendship means so much more. Friendships support, augment, buffer, cement and validate our lives. But we don't think to tell our friends this. We're embarrassed. We don't have the right words.

Maybe it's time we pick a few and share them. With a friend.