A Couple of My Childhood Friends

In recent weeks, my adult sons have been regaling me with tales from our lives ten or twenty years ago. I frequently have no recollection of the stories they tell or maybe only a small part of it sounds familiar. 

So my memory is not what it used to be.

I've lived a very private life. I was a homemaker and full-time mom for a lot of years and then I got divorced. Trying to learn to interact with "the public" post divorce was a very painful process.

I'm less naive than I once was but lack of naivety doesn't magically make certain problems go away. I trend towards expecting people to believe me because I'm telling the truth, but I lack a public reputation and a lot of things about my life fall outside some socially acceptable Overton Window and people on the internet trend towards thinking you're a liar rather than thinking fact is stranger than fiction and maybe you're a statistical edge case or something. 

I'm 59 and starting to feel like time is running out and at the rate things are going the world will NEVER be "ready" to hear me or whatever. So I guess it's now or never and you are free to trash talk me if that's how you are personally inclined and hopefully I'm right and the universe judges us on our character and that comes back to us -- good things come back to good people and bad people get bit in the butt for it

But I'm probably not right. Awful people seem to be winning in this shit world.

Anyway, off the top of my head I remember two part-Cherokee friends from my childhood and maybe I'm forgetting something and maybe later I'll remember something more and maybe not.

When I was 11, there was a girl in my class with long black braids down to her butt, an Anglo first name and a very Native sounding last name. I never met her father whom she said was full-blooded Cherokee. Her mom was white.

She lived down the hill and up the street and would walk to my house and we would play jacks. Most of my friends either lived on my street, often within two houses of my house, or their parents drove them to my house.

This was an unusually long distance for an acquaintance of mine to walk unaccompanied as a child at that age. She and I didn't really talk much and there was a lot I never knew about her life, likely because we were children unable to effectively communicate about the differences in our lives and the larger contexts that fostered the gulf between her life and mine.

I once walked to her house because I wanted to play with her and didn't just want to hope she showed up. No one was home and the yard was eerily empty. I found it disturbing, the evidence of poverty that was alien to my experience. I never went again and thereafter just waited for her to visit me on her terms.

My parents had more money than I understood at the time. They were happy to play host and they fed everyone who came over and I have a serious medical condition that wasn't properly identified until my thirties, so being at home helped me function at all in the face of not knowing what was wrong, thus being unable to even ask for appropriate accommodation from a world that saw me as whiney and picky and a spoiled child.

My friends tended to come see me and it was only years later that I understood the forces that fostered that. It worked for me and it worked for others who could get a free bite to eat rather than feel imposed upon and burdened and even when I tried to go visit them, somehow it didn't work, so it wasn't worth repeating.

I think her family moved and I only knew her that one year and I don't think I have said anything bad about her, so I will include what may be her name "for the record."

Her first name was Samantha and I think her last name was something like Whitetaildeer. 

In my teens, for a time one of my closest friends was one quarter Cherokee. Her father, whom I only met once, was half Cherokee. 

I only met him once because, as noted above, she typically came to my house. Unlike most people, she commented on that once in an accusatory fashion, like I did it on purpose or was controlling or something. 

She also had an Anglo first name and a Native sounding last name, though the last name was more ambiguous. I do remember it clearly but I'm not going to give it because I can't say anything meaningful about the relationship without saying some negative things about her. I'm not interested in dragging her.

She had an extremely dysfunctional relationship to some guy I never met. It wouldn't be accurate to call him her boyfriend. 

I think he may have had a girlfriend for part of the time she was involved with him. She was doing stuff like climbing in his window to have sex with him while he didn't publicly acknowledge any relationship to her.

She obsessed about it being true love and put enormous effort into picking a Christmas gift for him while he gave her nothing. She didn't want to hear DTMFA. She wanted someone to tell her that her feelings for him were valid or something. 

I tried to be that friend that made her feel validated. I never knew how to do that and also try to say "Girl, I'm concerned for you. This isn't love. He's using you and not even trying to pretend otherwise."

One night, she and I and another friend of ours stayed up all night drinking. I think that's the night we burned her not boyfriend's photo to try to put him behind her.

It's only one of two times in my teens where I got horribly drunk. She soon had dropped out of school and one day began giving me pointers on getting free alcohol by flirting with guys at bars. 

I was not in a position to in any meaningful way help her and I was too young to have any way to talk about her Native heritage and cultural forces and etc. I needed to save myself and not go down in flames with her.

So we quietly drifted apart as she began turning into an alcoholic at the age of 17 or 18.

I got married at 19 to another 19 year old. He joined the army a year later and we left town.

I lost touch with her entirely and I don't know what became of her. But after my father died, I realized she had few friends probably in part because she was one quarter Cherokee and her Native heritage was likely a big factor in her life starting to unravel while I stood helplessly by, unable to in any way stop it.