Sandra and Lydia

Sandra is my best friend. She has asked me whether or not we can be best friends and I have said yes. She is cute and popular. I am not - at least with boys - but she likes me and I am pleased. I am in Grade Seven - have just moved from Thetford Mines, so am new in this school - and enjoy the challenge of making new friends...I am off to a good start...Sandra has no brothers or sisters. She hardly has a mother. Her mother is at home, always, but not available. She is suffering from a mysterious illness which can not be identified. Shortly after I move on again, four years later, she dies of it - whatever "it" was. In all the years we live close together, and I am in her home, I see her mother just a handful of times. Sandra's father is an executive with a steel company and, with only one child, he can give her unimaginable things - a leather jacket, angora sweaters - things I can only dream of...But that is alright. I have a father, mother, two sisters and she wants to be in my home...

Her home is so different from mine.,,There is no noise. When we enter, we do not go into the main living areas. They are all blocked off - the curtains drawn and the furniture covered with plastic - waiting the day - never to come - when her mother can tend to them. We go into her basement - finished, with colonial-style furniture, and a bar in the corner - most elegant and "hip", by the standard of the day. We chat and compare notes about boys and studies. Once we decide to call the popular Montreal d-jay we all listen to after school. His name is Dave Boxer and he takes calls between records. I am frightened and shy when it comes right down to it, but Sandra is confident. She handles things well. Dave calls himself "Daddy-o on the radio" and wants to know if his listeners can think of alternate titles. I come up with "fire on the wire" but am too nervous to propose this. Too bad! I think it would have worked and I would have had my few minutes of fame!

Sandra is a good student, like me. Our teachers make no pretense of hiding our grades, but always return test papers according to the grades given - top one first. In certain subjects - English,History, French, Latin - mine is invariably on the top...But once Sandra beats me in English. I love her, but this is most difficult to endure...I wonder if she remembers this, as I do?...Rain or shine, we are together - walking to the mall, going to Dairy Queen, competing in summer athletics, stealing apples from the local orchards...Then...

Lydia moves into town. Like Sandra, she is an only child. She is Croatian. After the war, her parents moved to Germany and that is where Lydia was born. When they moved to Canada, her parents deliberately placed her in French school for a couple of years so she would become familiar with that language as well as German. Her father is a chemist, her mother a university professor. They are much more sophisticated than almost anyone I know. In small-town, suburban areas of Quebec, in the sixties, there is little diversity!

We become good friends. Sandra, Lydia and I become a threesome. Then something unexpected happens. I see they are becoming best friends and I am being pushed to one side. They still like me, but they like each other better. This makes sense, really. They are more alike in some ways. I have been brought up with rural, Protestant values. They have not. Lydia scoffs at people with large families and thinks them immoral. I think they are lovely..She has a hardheaded focus to life that I lack, and Sandra is somewhere in the middle. In any case, I see I have been squeezed out and it is painful.

The next fall, it is time for us to move on. Dad has accepted a new position way up north. I say good-bye to them, and - surprisingly-stay in closer touch with Lydia than Sandra, my (previous) best friend of several years. When I visit her briefly a few years later, she teaches me some Russian- her area of study. The three of us meet again for a reunion in Ottawa several years on again. Sandra has become a Grade One teacher, childless by choice. Lydia has two sons, and she and her husband have lived all over the world as diplomats...Just what I would have expected! Unfortunately, our lives have diverged so much we can't really pick up the pieces and resume meaningful friendship. We intermittently try to keep in touch, but only for a time. So where are my friends now? Who knows? More ships in the night!