Two 14-year-old girls with straight blonde hair, in Levi’s cutoffs, walking barefoot down a dusty forest road in July. Both middle children, both second to the youngest.  One singing first soprano, the other second soprano — from eighth grade chorus that year:  You stole my love, fie upon you, fie!

She was Tidbit.  I was Termite.  She was a gifted natural athlete — track, gymnastics, skiing. I was the one who never got picked in P.E., and so competed the only way I could, by drawing pages and pages of Adidas, instead.  We had a secret language, comprised of the derivatives or conjunctions of four words:  niddle, net, link, lee. October 22 and January 21 were our national holidays, our presents cool stuff from a babysitting budget — sentimental Hallmark gift books, straw flowers in tiny clay pots, a scented candle.

That summer, her family had moved to the slopes of Mount Hood, launching obsessive correspondence of at least three fat boy crazy, lavishly-decorated, secret-language-punctuated letters per week.  Bic or Flair pen on notebook paper.  But by our eighteenth birthdays, things had quietly dissipated.  There’s distance, and there’s… growing up.

Right?

There's growing up, and there's becoming more of.

When I saw The Friend Who Got Away: Twenty Women’s True-Life Tales of Friendships That Blew Up, Burned Out, or Faded Away (edited by Jenny Ofill and Elissa Schappell, Doubleday, 2005) I bought, on the spot, not one but ten copies before ever opening it.  On the title alone, I wanted to get this book to the precious women closest to me.  To… what?  Forestall the chances of losing them, the way I lost Renee.

Two indispensible books about friendship.

Nine of the books were in my friends’ hands, immediately.  It was another year before I read it myself.  There’s knowing, and there’s knowing too much.

It more than delivered on its title.  These twenty essays seared my soul.  Every memoir in the anthology — masterfully authored by such New Yorker contributors, acclaimed novelists and prosaicists as Patricia Marx, Vivian Gornick and Elizabeth Strout, among others — is a mirror in which I recognize myself as both the best and worst of friends.  Shadings of tenderness, petty miscues, loyalty, faux pas and, above all, too many precious, indelible, lost friends.

Only Renee has shared my life from our time of Levi’s cutoffs to the latitude and longitude I presently inhabit.  For I’ve saved every letter from the summer she moved, hundreds of them.  Yesterday, I finally took a chance on that battered cardboard box in my attic.  There are books about friendship, and there’s Facebook.

She became a smokejumper for the Oregon Department of Forestry.  I launched my own media firm in Los Angeles. We’re both in our second marriages, to much older men. Neither of us has ever been pregnant, and for the same reason:  we weren’t avoiding it, it just never happened.

There’s growing up, and there’s becoming more of.

Our dusty forest path isn’t a dead end, after all.

There’s sentimental, there’s emotional courage, and there’s redemption.