IN 1979  Margaret Thatcher became the U.K.’s first woman Prime Minister. The Iran hostage crisis happened when American diplomats were taken into captivity. Not a good 444 days for President Jimmy Carter. 

In pop culture: hand held electronic games were popular. 

SONY created a Walkman that played cassette tapes or played radio and hear radio stations play Pink Floyd’s album The Wall  released that year and The Knack’s My Sharona was the number one song. 

Breaking Away, Alien, Rocky II, Kramer vs. Kramer (Oscar winner) and Rock n Roll High School were among the movies that were released that year. 

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Outside a high school lunchroom in the Hudson Valley were a teenage girl and her friend standing around when I walked up to them. I had noticed a  text book with a paper cover decorated with stickers and drawings related to the heavy rock group KISS. I said to the one girl with the thick, wavy brown hair, “Are you a KISS fan?” She responded “Yeah. You?” Instant friendship.

Ace Frehley was her favorite band member (he wasn’t allowed to be my favorite). Shortly after that first meeting I nicknamed her Spacey. 

School sucked but it was more palatable with a good friend. She supported me and I supported her when things at school were hard or if one of us was going through something  challenging. We didn’t have any classes together – I was a sophomore and she was a freshman. We communicated by passing notes in the hall between periods when we saw each other, pre-cell phone era. We each responded to the other’ s question or situation. Our written conversations were about music – songs and rock bands, boys and how boring the classes were that we currently were in. In that order, usually. It’s so interesting to me now how important those topics were to us then.I had kept all the notes she had passed to me and kept them in a shoe box. A few years after her passing, I had moved and the box was lost. It broke my heart;  it was the last connection I had to her. I can still hear her voice and sometimes I can imagine her rolling her eyes at me. She didn’t think she was special or funny, but she was to me. 

I was lucky to have had that friendship, and grateful. It was the best of my life. And I believe I needed a friend during that time. I don’t know where I would be now if I had not had that friendship. Don’t mistake me – I had other friends and some also with common interests. I could be myself with her – quirks and all – more than with anyone else. It was liberating.  She died in the early fall of 1981 not long after her seventeenth birthday. (This loss was very hard and I will write about this in a future blog.) 

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I was nervous on the drive up to her grave site thirty-three years later, the first time I had been there since the day of her funeral. It was located at the top of the hill in the cemetery; the landscape had changed a lot over the years, naturally. It felt like I was being guided to a specific area of the cemetery but the fluttering of butterflies in my stomach prevented me staying grounded.  At first I didn’t see it.  On the way back to my car, I suddenly looked left… and found her grave site. I had walked past it. Spacey probably rolled her eyes at me.