When I was a kid, I grew up in a small California town. It's now a HUGE California town. I feel bad for the kids growing up there now. It's nothing like it was when I was young, and they will never know the joys of leaving your house in the morning and not coming home until dark, being busy and having fun all day long with just your imagination and your friends. Getting dirty playing on 'The Hill", or in one of the many citrus orchards - that was a joy! I played with our neighbors, the Shisler's and later, the Snead's, but my best childhood friend was Sandy Noon.
Sandy and I both had somewhat unique situations in our families. She was the youngest child in a single-parent family, and while I had a more traditional two parent family, my mom worked outside the home which at the time was not traditional. What that meant to us both was that we had very little parental supervision during the day. We were basically good kids, though, and rarely got into significant trouble.
We had other friends who came and went to our little group, but I think the most constant person would have been Patty Kindred. Patty lived catty-corner from Sandy's house and had a younger sister named Margaret. She had an at-home mom and a working dad. Patty's dad was significantly older than her mom - 24 years older as I recall. I remember him as being a grandfather type and jolly. I remember her mom often sitting on the lawn in the front yard pulling weeds. The lawn was a dichondra lawn which is rather like a clover lawn, so it didn't need mowing, but weeding was a must and Dora (Patty's mom) did so - often. Patty also had a cool playhouse in her back yard. I loved that playhouse and wanted one of my own.
Sandy had an older sister Pamela, and a brother Jimmy. Jimmy was exactly one year older than Sandy and they shared a birthday, which I always thought was cool since I shared a birthday with my twin brother David. I remember that Jimmy had some anger issues and often beat the garbage out of Sandy. She took it fairly well, but I found that I tried to avoid him whenever possible. Pamela was enough older that I really had little interaction with her.
Another thing about Sandy's home that was different from mine was that it was ALWAYS clean. Sandy and her siblings had chores that they had to do every day like dusting and vacuuming while her mom was at work so when her mom came home the house was clean and tidy. Our house in comparison was not clean and rarely tidy. When Sandy's chores were done we could play, so sometimes I helped her. It was a foreign concept to me, since I had no assigned responsiblities in my own home.
Sandy's house had a large den or rumpus room at the rear. We spent many hours playing that it was our 'apartment' and we were young professional secretaries. That was the ultimate job in our eyes back in those days. There was also a phone (not installed, so it didn't actually work) that we played with often. I'm sure it helped hone my improvisation skills later because we would carry on long conversations with the 'person' on the other end of the line. As we grew older some of our first boy-girl parties took place in that room.
Sandy's mom remarried and the family moved away when we were young teens. I was devastated. We kept in contact for a few years and Sandy was one of my bridesmaids when I got married, but time and family got in the way and we lost contact. The last time I saw Sandy she had stopped by our apartment in San Luis Obispo (Bruce was a student at Cal Poly) with her young son, Nathan. She had recently been divorced and was heading north in a station wagon with a trailer. At that time I had two small children and was busy raising them.
I had tried to find her over the years with no luck. I tried computer searches, plus I didn't know what her last name was anymore. Long story short...we reconnected a few month's ago via Facebook. It turned out that she lived about 30 miles away from me in Oregon and had been there for many years! It was so amazing meeting again after all these years! We've kept in contact and try to get together every week or so. It was like finding my long-lost sister! I love her and cherish our time together.
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