Sara
In the 1950’s Sally Ector (aka Sara) and I were Girl Scouts. Our troop, organized and lead by Mrs. Sarah Tumlin, met every Tuesday in the basement of the Methodist Church in Marietta, Georgia. Miss Sarah (Tumlin), determined to make us strong women capable of withstanding any storm, taught us to make camp stoves from tuna fish cans, and sit- upons from oilcloth. She taught us about honor, loyalty, and the value of friendship. We were eager learners and her efforts proved to be worthwhile. Even though, as we were to recollect, none of us ever made another tuna fish can camp stove, we somehow did absorb Miss Sarah’s wisdom regarding friendship. Moreover, I always maintained that the early lessons in camp fire cooking laid the groundwork for Sally/Sara’s recognition, at the end of our senior year in high school,as the recipient of The Betty Crocker Homemaker Award.
in 1958 and 1959 Sara and I worked together as journalists, to produce the Pitchfork, the high school newspaper of which Sara was the editor-in-chief. Here we learned about meeting deadlines, integrity and the importance of words.
Throughout the 1950’s we were friends in a small town in Georgia. It was a time when we were nourished by family, friends, and community. It was also a time of segregation and it was then that we all came to understand that life was not perfect, a fact that Sally/Sara never let us forget.. We went to college, went about making our lives, and our friendship dwindled. But we connected from time to time, reminiscing, catching up on personal changes, sharing our most recent literary finds and solving the problems of our imperfect world. And Sara would tell me, with pride, about Dan.
Finally, remembering Miss Sarah Tumlin’s advice to her Girl Scouts -to always make new friends but to cherish the old ones-we truly reconnected, both with each other and with other friends we had first known in the 1950s in Marietta, Georgia. We had reunions in CT, in Maine, Washington, and NYC. And during those reunions we talked incessantly about the past, about books and art and places and politics. In recent years Sara, our dear friend Sally, and I explored Savannah, NYC, Portland Maine, and Chicago. And at each of these reunions we made new memories and we were grateful for our lives, imperfect though they were, and for our friends.
This is great, Sue. Some of Miss Sarah's lessons were, indeed, worth holding onto. I've got my own group of school pals who get together every few years after first reconnecting at our 20th HS reunion (and deciding we never needed to attend another one of THOSE ever again).