My first crush, and one of my best friends from pre-school (I changed in kindergarten)… Nobody knows about him. His mom is sort of famous back home, producing children’s programming. It was awesome when she would storytell at us. Of him, I eventually saw pictures of him fat… then my parents saw him as a handsome, fit, teenager… And somewhere along the way he got into drugs and not even his mom knows where he is, if he is dead or alive…
My other best friend from pre-school… I haven’t seen her, but I’ve seen her daughter. Her spitting image. And if you do math, you figure my friend had her kid while she was in high school. I don’t know much of what she does.
From elementary school… my girl friend lives in NYC, works in the fashion industry, and recently had the most adorable baby that has made my clock tick with fury. Oh, she is also married.
My guy friend got into the Army… and is somewhere in the Army now. I remember our last exchange one of the things he wanted was to be stationed somewhere for a longer time… so that he could be “one woman’s man, instead of several”.
From HS… Three are married, only one has a kid. The funny thing is… the religious one who married young, and had her kid by 20, got her tubes tied shortly after that and now sponsors and works selling lingerie.
We moved around so much . . . the longest we lived anywhere in the US was 5 years, in Atlanta. I had several close friends there. I only keep in touch with one - she’s in grad school at Vanderbilt. Another girl has a kid and . . . I dunno what she’s doing. I vaguely remember her working as a dog groomer for a bit. I only found her recently on Facebook - as a kid, she was one of the smartest students in our year.
He is a gastro-enterologist in Missouri (far away from where we grew up). I, on the other hand, always considered the smarter of the two, never even got a bachelor’s degree. I may have been smarter, but he had much more application.
For the record, we lost touch in high school. And when I went to our 40th HS reunion, he wasn’t there.
Roddy
Hm, thanks to google, I can see that my best friend from kindergarten to second grade is now an interior designer.
My best friend from third grade to sixth grade died last year. I know this thanks to Facebook, but everyone was too delicate to say exactly what caused it. She had I had grown apart even in junior high. In retrospect, she was obviously developmentally delayed in some way, which wasn’t an issue when we were both young, but by the time we were twelve, we were obviously at different places mentally and emotionally. I hadn’t even thought of her in years until I heard that she had died, but now I think of her very often, and regret that I “dumped” her as a friend in such a callous way. I’m 32, by the way, so not many of my peers have died.
My best friend in high school - who I eventually dumped as a friend due to her emotional vampirism when we were in our 20s - was REALLY hard to google because she has an uber-common Chinese last name, and even adding in detail wasn’t much help. (A LOT of people with her last name went to UC Berkeley. Surprisingly.) Anyway, it turns out she has a doctorate in psychology, which she was working on when we “broke up”, and is now an adjunct professor at the professional school where she got it. She’s also working on her masters in a specialized subfield in psychology. Reading the little biography they’ve got on her makes me a little nostalgic for our friendship. I wonder if it would be worth trying to rekindle it at this point. She drove me freaking batshit, but that was a long time ago now. Maybe she’s over it. (Instead of using her psychology training to get over her lousy behavior, she just analyzed herself and then used whatever neuroses she found to justify it. She declared that she was a narcissist and then would use that as a justification for her total self-absorption. Um, no, I don’t want to be friends with an unapologetic narcissist.)
I did not have a childhood best friend until the fourth grade. We were friends until the seventh grade, when some other kids saw us holding hands and the whole school labeled us “queer” (with all the torment that went with that in 1970). Her mother got upset and commanded her to break off the friendship.
I have no idea where that girl is or what she’s doing. Googling her name brings up hundreds of hits on professional research papers which her mother has authored (they have the same name).
I did not have a best friend until a couple of years later. That girl is still living in our home town, is a mildly successful business owner and single mom with a daughter just out of high school. I rarely get back up to see her.
He’s become a middle manager for a building contractor company. He used to be the smartest guy I knew, but now he’s ignorant, bitter, and deeply xenophobic.
She started having kids early and has three now. She’s 20 and divorced, but she’s really lovely. I actually just saw her about a week ago- we went out to lunch and coffee. I hadn’t seen her in a while because of work and school and was celebrating the fact that my semester had ended and we had time to hang out.
She’s one of those friends who will always be my friend. We can go months without talking and one of us will call the other and it’s never awkward. We’ve been best friends since second grade.
I guess my cousin could be considered my first best friend, as we grew up a block apart, and also hung out a bit in our 20’s. She got married to a real ball of fire of a guy, had three sons and one daughter, owns three or four St. Bernards (used to have Great Danes), and is a proud grandma to the daughter’s oops baby. She has had an extraordinarily happy and fulfilling life, just the kind she always wanted, and she is finishing out the last year of her job here so she can retire, put her beautiful country home on the market, and go join the rest of her family who’ve already moved on ahead, down south…My best high school friend lives about 10 miles from me. Married at age 18, her husband is a Viet Nam vet, they have one (adopted) son who married a rich girl. And they provided my friend with TWO sets of twins! Other than being a deliriously happy grandma, my old school pal and her husband ride their Harley, go on day trips like a proper old retired couple, go out to eat at least 3 times a week, and are generally pretty darn happy with life.
My very first best friend - birth until about second grade - went from living on the northside of Minneapolis, very into ‘stuff’, very comfortable urban living, hoped to be a dentist… to living in a cabin in the woods with spotty electricity, three kids, and a husband who works sporadically. Last I heard, she was a substitute lunch lady (after we quit being friends, she used to make snarky comments about my mom being our lunch lady, sooo… Haha!). We quit being friends when she started hanging out with the “in” kids and I was the school nerd. Bad of me, but when I hear about her ‘living off the land’ life, I laugh.
My best friend from elementary school I haven’t seen or heard about in at least 10 years. Her name is too common for Google to help.
In Jr. High and High School I had 2 BFF’s. One I still see once a year or so. She married her highschool sweetheart right after graduation and they moved to the PNW for awhile but returned to our home town to help out her parents probably 15 years ago. She recently got divorced, just closed on her house and manages a mortgage company. She and her husband didn’t have any kids, didn’t want any, but did have custody of 2 of her teenaged nephews for awhile. They’re both adults now and she’s still very active in their lives, as well as her parents lives. She also talks to my Dad more than I do (it’s a small town), which I’m somewhat jealous about.
The other one I keep up with on FB, and we track each other down every 3 years or so to catch up. She has a 17yo daughter and married a guy she met on the internet back in 94. They were first internet couple I’d ever heard of, and I’ve got to admit I was skeptical, but they’re still going strong. She teaches 7th grade English in Colorado. We don’t talk all that often because we really have nothing in common anymore. She ended up very religious and I’m just, well, not. She’s always been active in her kiddo’s PTA and other school related stuff and I don’t have kids. She doesn’t drink, or even go to bars to socialize, and I’ve been tending bar most of my adult life. So, while there’s no reason we don’t get along, there’s also only so many time you can ask “So, how’s your brother?”
My childhood best friend now lives in Germany (Heidelberg, I think), where I believe he plays contrabass in an orchestra. We haven’t really kept in touch.
My BFF was my next door neighbour – we grew up together from the age of 3 and are still friends 37 years later, even though we live 150 miles apart.
We were both HUGE tomboys and are both lesbians in adulthood, which is pretty freaky. And no, we never experimented with each other, she’s like my sister, eww.
Oh, and she’s a Consultant Clinical Psychologist, heading up the CBT team within the NHS for her region.
My best friend when I was very young was a carpenter for a while, and may still be. I think he moved to the Netherlands, where his family are originally from.
My best friend in High School was, and still is, a devout Christian, so we lost touch. He’s doing computery things somewhere in Brisbane.
My BFF married her HS boyfriend as soon as she’d finished medical school, before going on for her specialist training; they have three daughters. She got a job as Medical Manager of an assisted-living facility in the Canary Islands, a position she’s now held for some 15 years. At first she complained about people there having only one gear (first), but eventually she slowed down to match their pace. BFF and her kids are tanned golden year-round, the husband is still fishbelly colored despite spending as much time on the beach as they do.