Ardis
June 17, 2009 | Filed Under Cast of Characters | Leave a Comment
I have had the same best friend since I was eleven years old. We are about as much alike as any two people could be. Our birthdays are both in December, so we have always told people: “we are twins born eight days apart”, which usually gets a laugh. We met the first day of seventh grade. We both were wandering around in a newly built junior high school in Carson City, Nevada. As we looked for classrooms that matched our little printed schedules, we were excited to see that we shared several courses and soon were inseparable.
Every weekend was spent at one house or the other. I had my own room and a lot of privacy. My mother has always been beautiful, neat, and precise. Ardis was happy to be in a home where we could order anything for breakfast and it would be prepared and served with a smile. No matter how stupid the joke, my mother was a ready audience. She told us every day how much she loved being a mother and how much fun she was having with us. If we put our shoes down in the evening, they would arrive back in the morning, polished and cleaned. Ardis, by contrast, had a home with five girls (and usually five friends) all giggling and arguing and plotting and planning. I loved being one of the girls. I loved the idea of sharing a room and getting lost in the sheer volume of events.
I learned many lessons in school but none were as important as those learned from my friendship with Ardis, especially during those formative years. Ardis’ dad was a Regent at the University of Nevada. Her family was very keen on education and all five of the girls would go on to graduate from college, which was quite an achievement in our neck of the woods. It was Ardis’ Basque mother who hammered home the importance of education. She was strict. As soon as we walked in the door, she would ask how much homework we had. Then she would say, in no uncertain terms, “no one does anything until all your homework is done.” Ardis and her older sister Cheri were both good students. They both got straight A’s all the way through school. They always whizzed through homework before they left the classroom so they rarely brought anything home. When I tried to follow their lead I fell behind in math and science. I guess I wish I had a do over. I wish my parents had stressed the importance of developing fundamental skills in all subjects but our home was all about riding horses, hunting, fishing and everything but education.
It took me many years to figure out how to study. During my second year of college, I had what might be called an “ah-hah” moment. I suddenly realized how much I used Ardis as a bench mark. If she could do well “without studying” then that is what smart people must do. Taking chemistry in college challenged all my assumptions about learning. I realized I needed more time and concentration to learn things that seemed to come more easily to others. As I consciously developed good study habits, I began to understand more about Ardis and all people who appear to learn effortlessly. Ardis is brilliant but she is also a much more efficient learner than most of us. It is possible her active home environment actually taught her to turn off distractions from the outside world. Or, she might have decided at an early age that it was simply easier to study at school. Her mother taught her an easy equation: “ Study, get A’s and you will have all the time you want to hang out with your friends.” Having parents who really stressed education combined with an innate ability to concentrate made everything she did look effortless. Dyslexic students, and others with special learning needs, often require learning strategies or scaffolding. That doesn’t make us less intelligent. It just means that we need to approach the learning of subjects in ways that best work for our individual learning styles.
Ardis and I had children at the same time. Her son was born a few years before mine and her daughter was born four months after Kristian. We lost touch for many years while I went to graduate school in the Midwest and then lived in Europe for eight years. But every time we get together it was always exactly the same as our first day in junior high. She is the only person who can make me giggle until I fall on the ground. To date, she is the only friend who has offered me one of her kidneys. I didn’t take it but it is the thought that counts.
Today, Ardis is retired. We communicate primarily by email which is a digital extension of the little folded notes we used to pass back and forth in the seventh grade. She travels so much it would take the NORAD Santa tracker to keep track of her. Before she retired, Ardis was a high school English teacher. I am certain her students loved her as much as I do. Her experience raising a son with ADD (and possibly having a dyslexic friend) taught her how to recognize those with special learning needs and figure out clever ways to help them. She has a phenomenal sense of humor so I am certain her students will always remember her. The perfect student becomes the perfect teacher? I suspect it happens more often than we know.
Ardis also taught me a great lesson about motherhood. A great mother is not someone who is able to raise rock star children. A great mother is someone who is able to love all her children equally. A great mother (and a great teacher) is someone who knows how to help all children feel like rock stars.
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