IMAGINARY FRIENDS

You hear about kids having imaginary friends that they share an imaginary cup of tea with or talk to or want to have a plate put out for them at dinnertime.   I never had an imaginary friend like that although sometimes it would have been nice to have someone to talk to during those lonely moments.    In sixth grade, however, all that changed.

We had been living in an apartment in Scarborough Ontario since I started forth grade.   One day we just left and never returned.  It was divestating for me.  We had lived in this building for two years and I had made many friends.  I was just starting sixth grade and was one of five Lynda's in my class (Lynda is my birth name).   I loved my school, the creek across the road where we had a rope swing, and all the fun us kids had after school and on the weekends.   There was this great store across the road where I would buy my mom jewelry for twenty-five cents.    This was the place where I first explored becoming catholic.  Apparently I told the priest at the church that he had a great poker hand for a phone number.   I remember a girlfriend and I finding a chocolate bar in her place and eating the whole thing.  Turns out it was ex-lax.   I remember one of my girlfriends little brothers running out onto the road and getting hit by a car.  It was so horrible to see his body fly through the air.    I remember being one of the fastest runners in my school,  hitting a boy in the nose because he had got me in trouble in class and then wouldn't stop poking me in the back as we were walking home, and liking a boy named Christopher Cleary.  

When we left Scarborough we moved into the home of some friends, the Gilligans.  They lived in a little house outside Georgetown in a place called Limehouse.  We had known them for a long time.  They had two daughters and two dogs.   Isabel was my age and we were like best friends, maybe even sisters.   We had so much fun together.  In the past we had spent time at a cottage  near Smith Falls where Isabel and I would catch sunfish and keep them as long as we could in a bucket.  We use to sneak bait from the bait bucket to feed our sunfish.  Isabel and I went to dances, ice skating, and would have fries and pop at Mother Hubbards  Restaurant when we got to go to  town.  At one time I remember we even had the same dress and it didn't bother us.   We were the second last ones picked up by the school bus and the second last ones dropped off.  I remember winter mornings we would be freezing waiting for the bus and just when we thought school was cancelled because of the snow there would come the bus cresting the hill.   One of the dogs, Queenie, got hit by a car one day on our walk home from the store.  She was fine, more in shock than anything, but to Isabel and I she needed us so we slept on the floor with her all night.   It was a great place to live even if we were only there for five months.  

Isabel and I use to hang out with the dogs, Queenie and Nipper, after school.  We'd come home from school, make some french fries and then off we would go outside to ride our horses with our trusty dogs by our side.  Next to the house was a big field that belonged to the farm next door.  Sometimes there were cows in the field but that never stopped us from our ride.  The thing is we didn't have horses but we did have great imaginations.  We would gallop across the field neighing like horses, hanging onto the reins, the dogs running right alongside us.  Sometimes the horses would buck when we ran into snakes.  They were great jumpers; no fence could stop us.  I know we had names for our horses but I don't remember them.   We both dreamt of having a real horse but knew that wouldn't happen.  It was fun to gallop across the fields, feeling free, no one knowing about our imaginary horses, our own secret world.   It was like we could forget everything else that wasn't good in our real world and ride off into that proverbial sunset.   

                                  What about you?  Did you have an imaginary friend?