"I could never forget you."

I started a post last night that went like this: "Fuck, ya'll...I'm middle-aged." but then this morning I woke up to the most wonderful birthday gift a 43-year-old girl could ask for: My first best friend found me on facebook.

I met Lisa at the start of second grade. She was in my brother's kindergarten class. My mom, a SAHM, and her mom, a nurse, got to talking and next thing you know my mom is Lisa's after-school babysitter. In addition to spending every afternoon together, she also walked to school and back with me every day. Lisa lived in the cove behind ours and since a 5- and 7-year-old wouldn't have been allowed to walk around the block alone, the man who lived behind us — I forget his name but he had a little fluffy dog named Reuben — allowed my dad to place a couple cement blocks on either side of the chain link fence so we could climb it and cut through his yard.

Lisa and I were complete opposites really. She was a tomboy with short dark hair who was active in sports. I was petite and girlie with long hair. We spent our time doing things like playing Little House on the Prairie in dress-up: she was always Laura and I was Mary. Or singing and dancing to records we played on her red plastic record player: "Snoopy & Red Barron" early on, later "American Pie" and the soundtrack of Grease.

Lisa hated that her mom kept her hair cut so short (even though it was actually pretty stylish for 1973). She used to wear long-sleeved t-shirts on her head like they were her hair, and she chopped off the hair of all her Barbies. "If I can't have long hair, neither can they," she told me.

The first time I went to Lisa's house, she showed me her room, which she swore she shared with her brother. It had a big double bed with a pink-checked bedspread. I kind of doubted her story. So I asked her where her brother was. "At camp," she said. But the sibling was no more real than the jersey-knit hair. Lisa was an only child, although it took a few weeks for my mom to convince me that was true.

The only-child thing worked to my advantage, though, because Lisa's parents used to take me on their two-week vacation to Virginia Beach in the summertime. Man, those are some of my very best childhood memories — we were barefoot and tan and we ran carefree all over the neighborhood of beach houses with Laura & Ann Meade Daniel and another girl named Mary Russell. When we weren't outside wrecking havoc on the other vacationers we were inside our beach house or the Daniel's playing the Grease LP and acting out the singing and dancing. I was always Sandy; Lisa was Danny.

Lisa's parents were very different from mine. We were conservative Mormons and they were rowdy Catholics. At the beach, they would stay up late with their friends drinking and smoking cigarettes. Her dad was gruff and used cuss words that were far more colorful than the occasional "damn" or "hell" I heard at home. The fact that they were so different made me ever-so-slightly uncomfortable, but it was kind of in a good way. I probably began developing my open-minded acceptance of others in those years I hung out at Lisa's house.

At the beach, Lisa & I attended the Children's Sand & Surf Mission (CSSM) which was like two weeks of Vacation Bible School on the beach. We'd sing songs and hear gospel lessons and play games. It was loads of fun. One evening both this little Mormon girl and that little Catholic girl got saved. I'm like Elvis — I don't want to miss out on Heaven on a technicality.

Lisa and I were best friends for more than four year, when my parents moved us from our Virginia suburbs down to the Mississippi Coast. Lisa's mom brought her over to say goodbye when we were packing the moving van. As they drove off, Lisa hung her head out the window and yelled Shaun Cassidy's fan club address to me. That's what kind of friend she always was.

Lisa honey, I could never forget you! I am so blessed on this birthday to have you back in my life...32 years later!