Old Friends

Good Morning!!

Yesterday afternoon, dark and gray (and not just the weather), I decided to look up an old friend.  My cell phone can perform miracles if you give it a chance, and I decided to look up a beloved friend from my childhood who lives in Laredo, Texas.  I had her last name spelled wrong in my book (I had to go way back in address books to find it at all) but finally was able to get through to her. How deeply exciting.  I have not seen this friend since 1960 when she came through Berkeley on her way back from Germany!  I have talked to her a couple of times since, and I had a nice long conversation with her mother in 1990 when I called going through Laredo. Otherwise, this friend blooms in my memory, just as sensible and fine as she was when she was ten, and I'll always love her.

She had lots of wonderful news about her city of Laredo. Laredo has a symphony orchestra now, the Laredo Philharmonic. It has a website, which I looked up after our conversation. A wonderful Irish cellist , Brendan Townsend, is the conductor.  Laredo Little Theater is thriving and  is now putting on The Importance of Being Earnest.  I can't tell you how much I'd like to see The Importance of Being Earnest performed in Laredo, Texas.  And the city has expanded to a huge city of hundreds of thousands, and many many new million dollar homes.  Nobody goes to Nuevo Laredo, of course, she said.  Well, of course they do not. Nuevo Laredo, the rich part, has come to them.  Has come to them to live, to stay.  Just as Tijuana has come to Chula Vista.  We don't go to Tijuana either.

I first met my friend in the spring of 1940, when my family moved from San Benito, Texas, in the Valley, where we'd been living, to Laredo.  We moved on New Year's Day, and it was an exciting event.  My parents were told by their friends that the Laredo schools were terrible and that we should be put into either the Catholic Schools or into Ellis Private School.  My grandmother was a very adamant Protestant, and my mother would never have offended her as long as she was around.  So into Ellis Private we went, and there I met my friend.

Mrs. Ellis had at some point previously established her  school on the second story of her large house.  You went up the stairs to a broad square-shaped hall, and the classrooms came off of that.  In the front room, which was huge, there were actually two grades.  There were ten third-graders at one long table, and seven fourth-graders.  I was in the fourth, and my nameless sister was in the third.  We were four boys and three girls.  I learned a lot of English grammer, a little geography, some math.  Mrs Ellis was a whiz at grammar.  We also had art.  We kids sat at our table along the sides, and the teachers were interchangable and would come in and sit at the head of the table.

Mrs Ellis's house was in the center of a huge yard full of mesquite trees, an ideal place for recess, where we ran around like wild animals. I tore the shirt off Jerome Granoff's back one day at some innocent game of tag. He cried and threatened retribution from his parents.  Probably the retribution was aimed at him and that was why he cried.  I felt terribly bad about tearing that shirt off; it was the first time I'd  committed a sin against another person in the world outside my family, and I felt terribly guilty.  I also felt defensive, as I remember.

Every morning we lined up and had flag pledges, singing, and so forth. Mostly this took place outside, but often was inside, downstairs on a linoleum-floored room with a piano for our accompaniment.  We sang our School Song to the tune of "Solomon Grundy."  "We go to Ellis Private School, right here on ---Street, and here we learn our lessons and everything else that's neat." I shall have to ask Nameless no. 2 if she remembers the name of the street.  It's hovering right outside my area of recall.  But my friend will never leave my memory. YAZZYBEL