On my first day of middle school, I ran around the cafeteria, inhaling the hashbrown aroma, and asking kids for their phone numbers, collecting connections as proof of friendship.
I came across as desperate and weird. I didn’t last long in public school.
As a married woman with children, I still feel awkward telling someone they fascinate me and that I want to talk about what makes them who they are. So, I usually just interview the folks I’d otherwise befriend.
I want to make friends with artists who share their world through different mediums, which teach me more about myself.
Friendship, I tell my adolescent children, is about finding your ‘people.’
I never thought I’d need so many people.
“Make friends with people who inspire your thinking and processing of the world whether that be visually, mathematically, emotionally, or musically,” I tell my offspring. “Find your intellectual rivals and artistic muses and encourage them. Care whether the people you respect, respect you.”
When my daughter, son and I arrived at the Georgia Renaissance Festival on Saturday May 24, 2025, people waving flags directed us into what must have been the last free place to park in an expansive field full of cars, vans and people.
My friend, her husband, daughter and son arrived as I texted, “We just parked.”
I pressed the button on my electric key fob to hear the beep that lets me know the car is locked. Scanning over the rows of parked cars, I spotted the red-haired boy who met my daughter in Kindergarten.
I watched my daughter’s friend stare at the ground when she said hi.
He’s shy. I like that since they consider themselves a couple. By the time we realized the friends from the same school bus lived two houses away, they sold their home to the city, which knocked it down to build a roundabout for traffic control.
My friend avoids our road now because nostalgia brings sadness.
The seven of us followed a growing group of fairies, elves, princesses and pirates toward the Renaissance village complete with port-a-potties marked “privies.”
As we adults examined the map and considered show times, my daughter wandered into the market place and found a mini trunk of trinkets in one of the shoppes. Her white gloves swam in for something plastic, shiny or otherwise beautiful in its simplicity. The shopkeeper said they were for trading, but gave her some to get started.
Her high-collared black dress and purple tights offered my daughter no pockets so I held her phone and her boyfriend held her trinkets.
Being one of the two moms, I knew what I was there for: making memories and paying for meat sticks. So I stood in line for $15 turkey legs – giant limbs of meat wrapped in aluminum foil as was the custom in the 16th Century, when a can of soda cost $4.
As I people watched, my son made photographs. He gave back the camera before the joust so I got some great action shots, but I packed up to stay in the moment just as the winner slashed the losing knight’s throat.
My daughter caught the death scene on video, though. She said that was her favorite part of the festival.
We dashed back to the field of vehicles among droves of sweaty characters drunkenly speaking Olde English. There was only one path out of the park so there was plenty of time for passengers to sober up.
After an hour idling in my air-conditioned Kia, we drove the paved highways of the 19th Century home.