The Ties the BInd

Earlier this week I was overjoyed to have found my friend Gail again - since then we have exchanged emails, kisses and much love. She said in this morning's email that she wondered what it was that bound two twelve year olds together so tightly that they should be able to resume their friendship after forty years. I wonder too.

It was with Gail that I had my first cigarette - at the Lighthouse cinema. We stood out on the veranda and she showed me how to puff and not 'baptise' the end. We were seen of course, and my mother tried the dubious method of getting me to smoke a whole packet - I did and never looked back!

It was Gail who explained the tricky bits about sex to me, taught me how to use a tampax and took me from being a bit geeky to one of the 'cool' people. We shared a love of animals, hatred of cruelty and a healthy resentment of authority. We once spent a boring lunch hour throwing our food at the ceiling fan to see if it would spatter: it did and we had twelve hours community service to clean up the school on Saturday mornings. That was cut down after I painted some shelves above a fish tank and killed all the fish with the paint dribbles.

If we were going out we would take hours ironing our hair - Gail said in one of her emails that we were so unlucky to have curly hair just when everyone else had long, dead straight locks - Gail woud sew the seams of our bellbottoms so they were skin tight. We would arrive at school and face the measuring of our skirts to four inches above the knee, turn a corner and, laughing, roll the waistbands up so that any sudden movement would have resulted in wearing a belt not a skirt.

For our school science fair we  made fruit wine! It was virtually undrinkable but it kept us going for our first experiments with alcohol: we soon moved on to rum and coke - vile drink that even now makes me shudder. At our friend Lori"s house we crawled into her parents' room whie they slept and sat in their wardrobe drinking their prized Scotch.

We had animals galore - Gail had a parrot that climbed into her father's treasured hi-fi cabinet - we spent the whole eveing praying he wouldn't notice the scratching and cooing sounds it was making. The Swimming Club decided to have their cats shot  - there were hundreds of them and we pleaded, cried and begged for a reprieve. Finally they said we could each have one. We had to find some way of marking the chosen ones - Mum's race badge seemed to make a nice collar - the cat vanished with the badge, neither of them ever seen again! It was from this rescue that Makalu the matriarch came to us with her resulting progeny of 400.

We fought a long and bitter battle over  the use of live animals for science disection: I seem to remember Gail ending up with the white rat Mr. Wiklander wanted to use. We refused, categorically, to have anything to do with the cutting open of frogs to see their hearts beating. We must have been so infuriating to teach for we understood .the value of the word No and,  united, could never be separated or made to change our minds.

I suppose these were the were the formative years where we learned our strengths and weaknesses and we were lucky that we found each other to boost those strengths and shore up the weakness. I know that I broke my heart when Gail went 'home for good' and that for forty years I have missed my friend. If you are in Toronto in the next twelve months and see, at the airport, two fifty something women hugging and crying it will be the two of us strengthening and renewing that unbreakable bond of friendship.