Wednesday, January 25, 2012

This One Time? At Band Camp?

This one time? At band camp?

I met my best friend.

(Was your mind going to a dirty place involving a flute? I thought so. Get it out of the gutter!)

Well, to be technical, I met Amy a few weeks before we left for band camp, the summer before we started our freshman year of high school. For those of you keeping track, that was 1995, which means we've been friends for almost seventeen years. More than half our lives. Crazy. (It also means that I'm old, because that dorky, awkward thirteen-year-old with the Luke Perry obsession doesn't seem like she could be gone. Oh wait. She isn't. She's now just a dorky, awkward thirty-year-old with a Luke Perry obsession that is bordering on kinda sad.)

Anyways.

At this magical little camp in northern Michigan I bonded with a girl I started calling "Buttons". I haven't the slightest idea why, but for some reason it stuck. She started calling me "Snickers", because during snack break I liked to buy giant Snickers bars to stuff my face with. (I don't care what anyone says, that marching was hard work and I needed my protein!) I knew Amy was the real deal when she braved the scary senior boys cabin to ask them if I could have my orthotics back. You see, I had bunions, and when they stole my shoes they also stole my orthotics and how in the world would I be able to march properly if my arches weren't being supported?

Are you getting an awesome image in your head of what I was like when I was thirteen?

From there we were pretty much inseparable. We were voted "Class Best Friends". We went off to different colleges, but still stayed in touch. We had our ups and downs, as all good relationships do. We fought, we cried, we laughed, we made up. We saw each other through graduations and first jobs and law school and engagements and weddings and babies. The night I met Mike? We were out celebrating Amy's birthday. That's a story for another day, but let's just say that she had a hand in bringing us together.

I was lucky enough to escape last week for a long weekend to visit Amy in Virginia. It had been over a year since we had seen each other last, and it was such an awesome three days spent laughing and drinking wine and knitting and just catching up. I'm pretty sure that there wasn't more than three minutes of silence the whole time we were together, and it is such a lovely feeling to know that while our lives have changed so drastically since that first summer, I'm pretty sure she would still have my back if I needed to confront some scary boys.


I think this picture is from 1998. All my band camp pictures are in a box somewhere at my parents' house. But, as you can see, by this time we were already much, much cooler than we were when we first met.



Virginia Beach 2012

We're still Snickers and Buttons.

And, for the record, I really do think Luke Perry has got it goin' on. Team Dylan, all the way, baby.

Happy Wednesday!!

1 comment:

  1. Great post! Looks like I'm a couple months late in reading it though. I love your matching 1998-era striped shirts. Wasn't my mom your cabin mom?

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