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And there she was
Several years ago I located a friend from my high school days on a social media platform. Okay, it was Facebook. She and I had been fairly close in our senior years and spent a lot of time together. I was pretty excited about connecting with her. I, of course, was stuck in the sixties as regards my memories. Had she married the guy she was dating in senior year? Was she still an “in your face” rebel like she had been about wearing those GAWD-AWFUL gym rompers? I remember she showed up to PE class in a pair of basketball shorts and a tank top, both emblazoned with the logo of the boys’ school team, only to be sent home on a three day suspension. Not many weeks later she convinced me to join her in wearing “hot pants” outfits to class. She was suspended, again. I got a detention. She was all about not being told what to do and always questioned the inequities of the rules laid out for the male students and the female students. She was fun to be with and maybe just a bit scary to be around. Teachers rolled their eyes when she showed up for class. She never had her homework done—or even started. She rarely handed in an assignment on time. I know she wasn’t at graduation.
Fast forward fifty years and there she was, accepting my friendship request, and we commenced the exchange private messages about how our lives had changed from the sixties to the era of online friendships. And, for sure, we had changed. She’d adopted a lifestyle I didn’t understand. She seemed happy to be the person who staged every part of her life to please someone. So many filtered selfies! All of the photos she posted of herself in, either evening wear or what I call 1950s classic casual. Her hair was just so and she often posed herself at a baby grand piano, always with some kind of hazy filter on her heavily made-up face. Where was my old high school buddy? Where was the teenager who skipped classes to rod around the neighbourhood with her boyfriend—hair flying, laughing loudly with a Matinee dangling from her lip. I had to squint to see her underneath all of the blah, blah and pish-posh. I couldn’t imagine this was the same person who once sat out on the grass in front of the Principal’s Office window loudly protesting the standing for the Lord’s Prayer when the student body was close to fifty per cent Jewish. She and I had asked our health teacher about abortions and birth control and were adamant about women having the right to say “no” to an overbearing man. In one class she got me to ask our health teacher about “queers” and “dykes”, subjects I really knew nothing about. I felt my face burn when the teacher looked at me and said, “This is neither the time nor the place for that sort of discussion. I expected more from you, Miss Durning. I should send you to the office but I know who put you up to this.” I had found my high school friend, who told me about how she and her boyfriend used “rubbers”, and then scoffed at the movie our PE class had to watch about “beauty of childbirth”. She snickered throughout the entire movie and her boyfriend fainted. My high school friend who managed to get me to ask why, on career day, “the girls” didn’t get to speak with the same employers as “the boys” and ask why weren’t the recruiters from TCA weren’t talking to “the boys” about being “stewardesses”.
And there she was. It was 2018 and she was on Facebook with a MAGA hat in the background of one of her classy-lady photographs. And there she was posting about how the election had been stolen from DJTurnip and saying how things could be made right again now that RBG was dead. And there she was posting about what a victory the SCOTUS had scored overturning Roe V Wade. And, sadly, there she was a card carrying member of an ultra-right wing Canadian political party and “gosh darn it” proud of it. Her last angry private message to me was about how I “just didn’t understand how important it was to maintain “law and order” in all aspects of life. This, coming from the person whose high school locker was an avalanche of dirty towels, gym clothes, Flexicoil notebooks and old lunches. And there she was, changed. I guess I never really knew her.
Yup, people change. And there she was. I never really knew the real her.
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