Friends, Best Friends

I have one friends left from high school. I have others who I would count as acquaintances, but one true friend. We talk a lot by email, we both live in different states and are too cheap to use the phone. Plus we both have little kids and when we do finally get a chance to talk on the phone it is inevitably interrupted by a screaming child in need of immediate attention. So we have discovered we can talk all we want over the wonderfully innovative Internet.

She told me today that I saved her more than once in high school. I don't quite know what she was talking about, but I had to laugh because it was her who did all the saving. Let me back up a bit, in junior high I wasn't not the most sane person. I was rebelling, shall we say, as a lot of kids do at that age of discovery. I experimented with smoking and drinking. I dated some questionable young men with less than stellar reputations. All of these acts of rebellion awarded me with a not so shiny reputation.

Well, I decided I wanted to change my ways and start living my religion, so I dumped all my friends and became a self imposed loner. I can't really say how C and I became friends because she had her own group of friends. I don't know if she took pity on my sitting at the foot of my locker coloring in my favorite Snow White coloring book. I know it sounds like I was in elementary, but no. She started coloring with me and inviting me to do stuff with her and her friends. Eventually it was just me and her doing stuff all the time.

C, my friend, didn't have to take pity on me, she could have stuck her nose at me because I was not worthy to be her friend, and I mean that in the literal sense. C comes from a religious family. She's always known what is right, and what is wrong. She didn't have to go through the rebellious years, and experiment to find out who she was and what she wanted to be. All I could have done at that point is drag her down. I am sure her mother wasn't too happy with me hanging around her daughter.

However, a funny thing happened, she raised the status of my reputation rather than me pulling hers down. She set a good example for me and showed me how to live the life style I wanted to live. She helped me to realize I didn't need to be friends with everyone to be important, I just needed to be a good friend to one person to be important. I don't really know what she meant by me "saving" her in high school, but I do believe she got it all wrong, she saved me.

Have you ever had someone like that in your life? Someone who saved you!