How do you make a story?

With help from your friends and family...that's for sure.

I am working on a new story—about junior high school. I have thought about this incident many times as something that would probably resonate with anybody who had been 14 years old—but I am just now crafting it into a story. Who knows why you decide to bring out a particular story.

Whatever the impulse to develop this story, I am discovering how much I appreciate bouncing my memories off the recollections of others who were also there. Especially my friend, Betsy.

Betsy and I have known each other since we were Girl Scouts in the fourth grade. We went through Piedmont Junior High School and Central High School together. And we have shared our lives since. We have accumulated a mountain of memories.

Betsy lives several hundred miles away. Thank heavens for the telephone.

Today we talked of Piedmont Junior High School and she shared what she remembers about the wonderful days of 13- and 14-year-olds. I am often awed by her encyclopedic memory of teachers, their names, subjects and their foibles.

We laughed.

We hooted.

We giggled over the odd things we remembered about those old—to us then—people who probably were not old at all.

"Don't you have your PORTHOLE?" she asked. Well no.

But she has her album from 1951—the album from our ninth-grade year.

Technology and email to the rescue.

She scanned some pictures and sent them last evening. 

Now I have the faces of the Piedmont faculty freshly in my eyes, and memories are popping up like popcorn in a pot on a hot burner. 

Back to my point—it takes a village to raise a child, and it takes friends to help turn misty memories into real stories.

I will be telling this new story Oct. 17 at the Friendship Heights Village Center in a program called "Seeing Red." Are you curious?