Friends

I went to a small school in the country, where the elementary school and high school were separated by an alley. The building on the left was for kindergarten through sixth grade, and the building on right was for seventh through 12th grade. The buses would pull into the alley between the buildings and all the kids would split up between the schools. K-12 students all rode the bus together.

You don't hear much about that kind of thing anymore.

Even my old school (which is where my nieces and nephew go) is now separated into three schools -- kindergarten through fifth grade in the elementary school, sixth through eighth in the middle school and ninth through 12th in the high school. I guess everything does change with time.

Anyway, I graduated in 1986 with 86 kids in my class. And 82 of us had been together since kindergarten. We knew everybody and everybody knew us. Our parents all knew each other, too, so if you got in trouble at school, your parents knew about it before you got home.

We built a history together. And even though we all scattered to jobs, military, college, marriage, kids, houses and other stuff, we all had those 13 years of school together.

I cried when I graduated. I knew there were a lot of those people that I'd never see again. I knew that our school was the one thing every one of us had in common. And without that one thing in common, some of us wouldn't really have a connection anymore.

Newspaper jobs, especially in the beginning, tend to lend themselves to job-hopping. You basically get a job at a small paper, then work your way up until you get to the size paper you like. Along the way, I've met and lost friends. We say we're going to keep in touch, and we do ... for a while. But when one person leaves, and you don't have that job as a common thread anymore, you tend to grow apart.

I've been at this paper for 13 years, longer than I've worked anywhere before. I made some fast friends when I moved here, and I've kept those friends for all these years.

In the beginning, we all worked at night. That schedule limits your access to the outside normal world, so I think that tends to fuse friendships even faster. My friends and I used to have dinner together once a week. And we used to get together for movies, shopping and other adventures.

Just as I made history over 13 years with my schoolmates, I've also created a 13-year history with these ladies. We've seen each other through marriage, buying houses, losing family members and having babies (well, a couple of us, at least). We've talked each other off the ledge when work, husbands, parents, bills and adulthood in general tried to get the best of us.

But it seems that as the years go by, we're all moving physically farther apart. We all bought houses, two of us in different towns, and two of us on opposite sides of the same town. Then everyone but me left the paper for different jobs. One of our group made a complete career change.

The first one of us to leave the paper got another job here in the same town. Then the one who started a whole new career managed to get an internship here in town, too. But then came the next one. She branched out a little and got a job one town over.

These changes have made it harder for us to get together. Our dinners aren't regular anymore, and with different job hours and two kids involved, even going to a Sunday afternoon movie takes a secretary and several calendars.

Fast forward to this past week. One of our group has accepted a job in another town. A town that's an hour and a half away. No more spur-of-the-moment lunches or shopping trips after work.

Then another one announced that she and her husband are moving three states away. THREE STATES AWAY! I just did a map search and learned that it would take me 10 hours and 2 minutes to drive to her new town.

I want to think that unlike the friends I made and lost at earlier jobs, the four of us will make a better effort at staying in touch. I also hope that by now, we have more in common than the job that helped make us friends to start with.