The earliest childhood friend I remember was my classmate, Deanna Richards. We have known each other since we were in the third grade. Her parents and my parents were friends, and her two older brothers and my two older sisters were friends. We were all good friends. In my opinion, Deanna and I were more like sisters than friends. Growing up, Deanna was always such a pretty girl with her medium brown Farah Fawcett hairstyle, big brown water chestnut eyes, long, thick dark brown eyelashes, and her famous ski-slope nose.
Her sense of humor, the ability to make me laugh, and her warm and caring disposition made her inner-self just as beautiful. Even though we lived about a mile away from each other, during the summertime we were inseparable. Our day would start off doing with each of us do
...ing our daily housework. This doesn’t mean that is how it always worked out. But, normally we did do our work first. Every day after I finished my chores, I would ride my bike to Deanna’s house. We would then walk to the nearby college in our town.
The college had a recreation program for the kids during the summer months. Our normal routine at the college would start off with walking around the track field: about two or three laps, then we would run about two or three miles around the track. Afterward, we would go inside and start doing warm-up exercises, following our gymnastics. We weren’t all that good at gymnastics, but we sure thought we were. Preceding our extensive work-out we would head to the Olympic size pool practicing our freestyle, breaststrokes, butterfly stroke, an
last but not least our diving techniques.
After our long extensive day of exercise, we would go to the sauna room and relax for a while. Finally, before we went home, we used the college’s shower room facility and took a nice long hot shower. We had to look refreshed and cleaned, just in case we ran into some of the guys we knew from the neighborhood. One day, we decided not to do our normal routine. We decided we were going to go on a long bike ride; Oh Boy! Did we ever go on a long bike ride!
We had ridden our bikes in and out of different neighborhoods, taking different paths, and going through different parks. We actually ended up in the next town where my mother worked about ten miles from home. Well, on this particular day while we were laughing and enjoying our bike ride, I drove over a rock with my bike; took a flying leap in the sky. Needless to say I hurt myself . Deanna and I didn’t know what to do because we knew we shouldn’t have ridden our bikes that far without anyone knowing about it.
We did end up calling my mother and naturally she left work and came and got us . My mother made sure we were both ok and then she chewed both of us out saying we could have really gotten hurt or someone could have grabbed us and because we didn’t let anyone know where we were going, nobody would know where to start looking for us. On our way home my mother took Deanna and me to Dairy Queen for hamburgers.
We didn’t dare tell our sisters or brothers, because we knew that they would get mad and ask “why didn’t they get to go to Dairy Queen? With the summer almost at an end, we started hanging out around the house more, watching television, playing outside or just staying in our room listening to music. Our parents thought we needed to start winding down and getting ourselves ready for school to start. Now that Deanna is all grown up and living in Ohio, I only see her when she comes down for the holidays or on her vacation. But, I still have my memories of our summer months and we keep up each other on Facebook.
