Before We Traveled

 

Barbie's Graduation Picture

“Traveling leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” ~ EBN Battuta

 “Hey, Kid, do you want to go to Alaska?” This question came up during a phone call from my best and oldest friend, Barbie. It was the year 1994.

Without even thinking about it, I answered, “Are you serious? Yes, of course, that would be great. When?”

 “Good. I’ll call triple A and get our plane tickets. I want to go and visit Bruce and Dana on Kodiak Island in June. Tom doesn’t want to go so I figured that I would ask you if you can get off work for a week. I knew you would want to go.”

 Oh my gosh! We were going to Alaska. Although I didn’t know it in 1994, this was the beginning of my many travels with Barbie. For the next twenty years, we continued to share adventures by land, air, and sea until the covid 19 pandemic put an end to our travel fun. I want to tell the stories about our adventures, but before I begin, the reader needs to understand my deep connection to Barbie and the story of our friendship that has remained unbroken throughout the years.

 In the 1940s and 1950s, Barbie and I grew up in Bedford, Ohio where we lived on the same small street. She was an only child and lived with her mom who had diabetes, and with her dad, who was a bartender. They lived in an upstairs apartment in a two-story home right next to the railroad tracks. Barbie’s whole house shook when the steam locomotives rumbled by on the tracks. Barbie was three years older than me, closer to my sister Betty’s age, but for some reason decided to befriend me instead of Betty. She said that she liked me better and I became her little sister. Still to this day, I don’t know why I was so lucky.

 Barbie was, and still is, energetic, a real “go-getter.” She participated in many school activities like Girl Scouts and Rainbow girls. She loved animals and had a little dog named Mert, a skinny terrier that she dressed in a coat and little rubber doll boots in the winter before taking it for a walk. Barbie was perky with short blonde curls and an unending supply of laughter. She had a slim waist that curved into two wide hips. Later she said these hips were perfect for when she had her twins. She could rest one on each hip. But I’m getting a little ahead of the story.

 During the summers off school, I liked to sleep in, read a book or do nothing – the opposite of Barbie. She would come up to my room and shake me awake. “Come on! Get up, sleepyhead!” she coaxed as she dragged the covers off me. “We’re going for a hike. It’s a beautiful day.” I moaned and groaned but always crawled out of bed and went with Barbie. I didn’t want to miss out on whatever adventure she had planned. Often, we walked along the railroad tracks picking wild strawberries, hiked in the Bedford Glens, and dug clay out of the creek banks. We jumped rope, double-Dutch in the middle of the street. We played games like hopscotch, badminton, and jacks. Barbie introduced me to a multitude of active skills. If I understood the concept of admiration at that age, I might have said I admired Barbie. As a kid, I only knew that I wanted to be around her.

 When I was about five or six, Barbie taught me how to ride a bike. She started me out on her tiny two-wheeler bicycle with no training wheels. I was wobbling along just getting my balance when a car came around the corner on our street and almost ran me over. That scared me, so Barbie tried another tactic. She took me to the top of a hill on a paved street and told me that if I rode down the hill the bike wouldn’t fall over, and I would be able to ride a bike – very easy. I believed her, took a deep breath, and pushed off down the hill, or maybe Barbie pushed me off. But she was right, I didn’t fall over, and then I could ride a bike.

 When I was in ninth grade, Barbie and I both went to Bedford High School. She was a senior and ready to graduate that year, while I was a mere freshman in my first year in high school. We walked together to school each morning and had to pass a gas station where two young men watched us sashay by each day. One morning, one of the guys wolf whistled as we passed the station. Barbie stuck her nose in the air and ignored them, but I looked to see which guy whistled. That day at school Barbie passed me a note and wrote how she thought the one guy was so good looking. 

Now remember I was a fourteen-year-old teen, so did not put a great deal of thought into what I did with that note. For whatever strange reason, after school, I decided to go to the gas station and sell the note to the guy who whistled at Barbie. He paid me fifty cents. That note led to him asking Barbie for a date and the fifty cents led to me buying two butterscotch sundaes.

 Barbie continued dating the gas station guy, who turned out to be Tom Richards from West Virginia. On Barbie’s graduation day, she surprised me with the news that she and Tom had run off to West Virginia and gotten married, by changing the date on her birth certificate. They didn’t want her parents to know until she turned eighteen. After her graduation things changed, Barbie’s dad left her mom for another woman. Barbie’s mom then went to live in southern Ohio by her mom, Barbie’s grandmother.  At the same time, Barbie left our neighborhood to go and live her life with Tom as a married woman. What happened to that note, you wonder? Well, Tom kept it in his wallet till the day he died. By then it was worn thin and barely legible. After all, they were married for over fifty years.

Our lives moved forward, and I grew up. Barbie and I always kept in touch with each other. Barbie had four kids in two years. A two-year-old daughter, Little Barb, and a one-year-old son, Mitch, were waiting when she came home from the hospital with fraternal twins, a boy, Bruce, and a girl, Amy. They were living in Aurora when Barbie decided to take her kids and move south to Uhrichsville to live by her mom and grandmother because it was cheaper to live down there. Did I mention how independent Barbie was? She told Tom he could come live there too if he wanted to, so he did. Tom got a job working on the railroad. They now lived ninety miles away from me.

 Meanwhile, I married at age nineteen and tried to keep up with Barbie by having four kids, two girls and two boys, but it took me five years instead of three. The fact was, I could never keep up with Barbie, not even today. My life followed a different path. Instead of staying married, I divorced my husband and started a new chapter in my life. None of that mattered to our friendship. Throughout the years we continued to stay in touch. Barbie continued to teach me new things and still wouldn’t let me sleep in. I can’t imagine what my childhood, or my adult life, would have been like without her, less exciting for sure, as my life was never boring alongside Barbie.

Back to the year1996, when Barbie and I were planning our trip to Kodiak, Alaska to visit her son, Bruce and her daughter-in-law, Dana. They had fraternal twins too, Tommy and Alyssa. Bruce was in the Coast Guard which was the reason they were living in Kodiak. I was super excited about taking a trip to Alaska, especially with Barbie. I knew we would have a good time and wasn’t wrong. So began “trip one” of my travels with Barbie.