I remember back when I was in the 4th grade there was a girl named Mary. She was a bit odd. She was always doing crazy things like eating her crayons and such. I think she just did it for the negative attention, but the other kids all thought she was so weird. Many of them teased her and made fun of her a lot. Others just shunned her completely and didn't want to be seen associated with her. I was always nice to her though. I thought she was strange too, but I didn't feel the need to be mean to her because of it.
One day Mary told me that I was her only friend. I was the only person who was nice to her. That seemed to sad to me. I had a lot of friends and didn't even consider her to be a close friend. She asked me to go home with her after school one day to play at her house and I said, "Sure."
After school when I got to her house I was amazed! There were video games everywhere! Not like Nintendo games, this was years before that. These were like pinball machine sized games. She had Frogger, Asteroids, Ms Pacman, and tons of others! It was amazing! It was the coolest house I had ever been in by a long shot! It turns out her father was a video game repair man. They had buckets of quarters just sitting out all around and I could play for free for hours!
When I left I couldn't help but wonder why Mary had never told anyone about her house. If the other kids knew they would be so nice to her all in hopes of being invited over to her awesome house, but then I think I figured out why. Who wants fake friends? Who wants to reward people who in their hearts are cold and mean? She wanted a real friend.
1 comment:
I've thought about this idea a lot over the years. I have a ton of acquaintances, but it takes a long time to recognize who are real friends. I also wonder about those people that I feel so strongly connected to, but we don't talk often at all - maybe even once a year or something... are we still 'real friends?'
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