Childhood Connections Run Deep

The Boston Globe

Ann Marie and I were not close friends. I didn't walk to school with her. I didn't sit with her at lunch. We didn't talk on the phone every day. We never pinky swore, "We'll always be friends." And we didn't tell each other our every thought and dream. And yet, because we grew up in the same neighborhood, were the same age, and went to the same church and school, we played together many afternoons. Marbles in our dirt driveways. Freeze tag on our front lawns. Red Rover. One, Two, Three, Red Light. Board games. Cards.

She had a pajama party once, and all the girls in the neighborhood slept in her living room. Her mother served cocoa and fresh-from-the-oven cookies. Everyone had on new flannel pajamas.

I remember the day her family invited me to their summer cottage. I learned how to play horseshoes there. Her father taught me to swim. She remembers the day my father took the neighborhood girls to an afternoon showing of "Imitation of Life" at the old Randolph Movie Theater and how she and Janet Butler and I cried all the way home.

Ann Marie and I shared childhood. Double sessions. Sixth-grade dances at the Devine School. Confession on Saturday afternoons. Sunday school at the old Boston School for the Deaf. Comic books and penny candy and running under the sprinkler on summer afternoons and talent shows in my backyard.

Ann Marie is Ann now. She has been Ann all of her adult life, a life she's lived for 50 years only a few towns away. Just a 20-minute drive and yet we have never met for lunch or dinner. Or even picked up the phone to talk.

Maybe it's because we don't need to. I saw her last week, and I saw her baby sister, Claire, too, someone we shooed out of the room when we were kids, someone who was two years younger, two years a chasm when you're 10. And there it was in an instant for all of us: Lewis Drive. Davis Road. The three of us children, still, our fathers at work, our mothers just out of sight, in the next room, only a beckon away.

I remember how her mother loved to sew and that she shopped at the Bargain Center in Quincy Center and bought all her fabric there. I remember that she ironed every day as she watched her soap opera. I remember watching her feed clothes into the wringer washing machine, amazed that she could do this, amazed that she didn't squish her fingers. And I remember watching her hang all the clean clothes in neat rows, socks nowhere near the flapping white sheets.

She remembers that my mother wore fancy hats, even on weekdays. And that she went to work every day. And that sometimes she made fancy cakes, which she decorated with flowers she created from confectioners sugar. And that there was always music in our little house because my mother loved to sing.

Old soldiers, that's what we are, comrades who marched, maybe not side by side, but in the same troop, every day, day after day, riding our bikes around the same block, sledding down the same hill, playing the same games with the same friends, all the way from single digits into our double digits, right into our teens.

I see the adult Ann Whalen standing in front of me, but I see Ann Marie Tantillo, too, in a starched plaid dress, her bangs newly cut for school, smiling shyly. And she sees me as I was, Beverly Curtin, short frizzy hair, wearing ankle socks on an Easter Sunday morning, when everyone else is wearing nylons.

We stood on the periphery of each other's lives when we were kids. We had closer friends. We stand on the periphery still. But here we are, veterans of a time and place we loved, that all too few can see.