I received the nicest Christmas wish in December from an old friend; he wrote:
“I always hope for one random serendipituous lovely thing to happen at Christmas that doesn’t cost money. May it happen for you.”
It happened for me today as I celebrated with another old friend my birthday and hers, some 30 years after we celebrated eight. Friendship: a serendipituous lovely thing to happen that doesn’t cost any money. [Christy, Rachel, Kiersten, Robin, me, Kristine, on my eighth birthday]
My camera was with me the whole day and I didn’t shoot one frame of Robin and me. This is the most recent photo I have of us together, when we were 17:
So I came home and dug through the photographs from our childhood. In kindergarten, Brad and Robin were my first real friends. But there were many, many others, including Dean who is pictured with us here: [Dean, Brad, Robin, me]
Our shared memories this afternoon were such a gift. I laughed until I cried at the memory of the game we used to play where we’d blindfold one another and feed each other strange things to see if the other could guess what they were eating. Robin got serious for a moment and sincerely apologized for the times she fed me straight Tabasco and dog food. 
Of the Halloween when we trick-or-treated at our beloved piano teacher’s door…well, the story still circulates around my family so everybody knows that one. And the time we were playing Nancy Drew upstairs and needed a better way to spy through the wooden closet door…Robin’s parents are still furious with us over that one. Suffice it to say, we’re duly humbled as adults by any havoc we wreaked as children.
serendipity |ser?n?dipit?|
noun
the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way : a fortunate stroke of serendipity | a series of small serendipities.
One random and serendipitous lovely thing, friendship is. It was simply by chance that we were born only five days apart and thus, determined by age, landed in the same kindergarten class and developed what has become a lifelong friendship.
Robin and I talked and talked and barely scratched the surface of all there is to say. We looked up and I was an hour late, and an hour doesn’t sound like much late but it’s very, very, VERY uncool late when picking up children from school. So I called a friend, Suzanne, intending to ask her if she would let the school know I was running behind, and without missing a beat, she told me no worries, she was at school and would pick up my children and take them to her house until I could get back. When I arrived at Suzanne’s, our children were raiding her kitchen before they all ran off to play. Friendship. Suzanne and I sat for awhile, talking about my wonderful day, and marveling at how, as children, we were so free to roam and explore the world. We both agreed that as parents now ourselves, we’d have to side with Robin’s parents on the issue of taking pocket knives to doors inside the house.
And although this has nothing to do with anything, other than the fact that I’m posting under the topic of “my first camera” (which was a birthday gift from my big brother), it’s was just too good to leave out: [Brad, in 7th grade math class]
Fortunately (or unfortunately) for my classmates, all of my negatives are filed, and all of my digital images are backed up and there’s a printed copy of everything. Because for me, it’s all about the photograph. Try holding a .jpg ten, twenty, thirty years later. 
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