Tuesday, January 04, 2005

From friends to loves to loving friends

Yesterday I got back from a long visit to the second family in Michigan. We always have such a great time, but this visit was extra special. Not only because it was the Christmas season, but because I got to see a lot of dear old friends.

I guarantee there will be friends like these in your lives. You will meet at a time when you have a lot in common...like belonging to the same church and youth club. You will be about the same age, going through the normal stuff for that age. You will get crushes on each other and imagine your lives together in your future.

In our time, it was the "Girls from Chicago" (which included one from Milwaukee) and the "Guys from Detroit". We would travel to various locations in the Midwest for youth meetings, staying at hotels and having ridiculous numbers of people stay in a room to save money. We had a sliding scale of costs for the rooms...if you got a bed you paid more than if you had to sleep on the floor. The use of pillows and blankets also came at a premium. Actually, nobody slept on the cold, wet beds after a particularly ammo-intensive ice fight.

Eventually special relationships formed between a Chicago gal and a Detroit guy. At that age, I really thought that we would all end up marrying each other. But being still in high school we had seen barely a glimpse of the world and its possibilities.

The Girls from Chicago certainly had not foreseen the possibility that the Guys from Detroit would ever meet girls that they liked more than us. So we never saw it coming - the event that would rock our world and change our circle of friends forever...

...the Guys from Detroit discovered the Girls from Pittsburgh.

(to be continued)

No comments: