Friends For Half A Century

Day 336: Marilyn and I first met when we were ten. She was a hall monitor at our junior high, and I was in the hall between classes. As the most unpopular kid in the school, I was always expecting to be bullied, so when she confronted me, I pulled the necessary paperwork out of my notebook and said loftily, "I. have. a. hall. pass." Thus began a friendship which has lasted over fifty years.

We shared a lot of interests in those days: reading, studying, music (she was an accomplished clarinetist) and fishing, a sport which we pursued unchaperoned at a rent-a-cabin on a distant lake as often we could. In those days, my spirit of adventure was just as strong as it is now, and it never once occurred to me that my offsider might not feel the same way. I led camping trips and midnight piscatorial excursions in a "borrowed" rowboat, and sallies into neighboring blueberry patches and vegetable gardens when our expedition fare ran out. Marilyn tagged along, compelled (I realize now) by her mothering instincts to keep an eye on me lest I get into too deep trouble.

Perhaps the most memorable of our "survival" trips took place in a pelting downpour. We'd pitched a tarp and spread our bedrolls expecting to camp for two nights under starry skies. Alas, in the Pacific Northwest, there's no assurance of dry weather, and by midnight of the first night, the rain was coming down in sheets. Upon arising in the morning, we got a small fire going; not enough to warm us or dry us out, but sufficient to cook some Bisquick dough wrapped around a stick. Foresight, y'know...if you're going to be thrust into a survival situation, you should be well provisioned, at least for your first meal. After our meagre breakfast, the work of the day began. The hunter-gatherers needed to hunt and gather or go hungry at dinnertime. It was late in the year, if memory serves, and we were a long way from water and our skill at catching perch was worth nothing as far as filling our bellies. We created a few snares in the hopes of catching a squirrel or rabbit (not that either of us would have known what to do with it if it had stumbled into one of them). We cast about for edible fruits, nuts and berries (a subject on which I was knowledgeable) and came up with only one food source: the fruit of Mahonia nervosa, the Oregon Grape.

Oregon Grape is no relation to true grapes. It resembles a low-lying holly plant (thorny!) and bears a cluster of pencil-eraser sized tart, seedy and altogether unappetizing fruit. We gathered these in number and ate handsful raw, and then began trying to figure out some other way of rendering them edible. In the end, we speared them on tiny sticks and heated them over the fire for our evening repast and again for breakfast the following morning. The rain had not let up, so at last we retreated from our "survival expedition" to my house, a hundred yards from camp.

Marilyn is the mother of four and a grandmother of one. She does not have an outdoorsy bone in her body. Years ago, she set down a rule: if I don't talk about mountains, she won't talk about kids. We both slip from time to time, but the friendship remains solid as a rock, despite what I put that poor girl through.

Footnote: the card was given to me by her during our first year of friendship, and the Buddha was a gift for my 16th birthday.