It was the summer of 1961, the year Lydia Hinden and I both turned 18. We had just graduated from Douglas MacArthur High School in Decatur, IL, and were just about as sophisticated a pair of young women heading off into the future as the 50’s could boast.
We had met, years before, in Girl Scouts? We were in the first freshman class to enter the new Douglas MacArthur High School. I think we met at her house every morning to catch the school bus, but I’m not sure. I do know that there were several times when we walked together to school across a city park and through a small ravine where, in winter, we would sometimes joke that now we could boast to our kids that we had had to trudge through snowdrifts to get to school. I would hang out at her house after school, where we watched Disneyland and The Mickey Mouse Club together, stretched out on the living room floor propped on our elbows. I still remember being delighted every time Tinker Bell used her magic wand to open the show. I think she did, anyway. Memories are misty.
By junior year, Lydia was dating one of the best looking senior boys, while I had an unrequited crush on his best friend. A few years later, she married her guy, I finally dated mine and found that we didn’t have a single thing to talk about. That might have been more disappointing than getting dumped. Which wasn’t necessary. He didn’t call again and I didn’t want him to.
Life for me after that time was a crash course in the modern world. No trees to climb. No vampires at the windows. No adoption by Native Americans. Just me. Barely grown-up skinny blonde me. Who, if she had her druthers, would likely have continued to read about life instead of live it. The real world, she would find, was not her oyster.
I went on to break two engagements, marry two people, divorce them both, have several meaningful one-five year relationships, most of whom, if they haven’t died, are still friends of a sort. She is still married to her guy.
And these days, she and I have a monthly hour-long conversation on the phone. Our lives have been so different, but from our first conversation we didn’t skip a beat, not to mention a few decades. And I can be honest about myself with her. She’s read all my books. We admire each other immensely, I think. I certainly admire her.
It was my great good luck as a young girl to have made a friend of Lydia Hinden. Lydia Hinden Mussulman turned out to be the very definition of the BFF. Best Friend Forever.