When I was a little girl I brought my mother the gift of friendship. I changed her life forever. She can thank me all she wants because it's true. My mother met her best friend because of me. Because of cute, curly pigtailed, jelly smeared me. Here's how the story went down in history.
I often ran away as a child. Not out of spite, but out of complete ignorance of never knowing that the world was NOT my playground. Literally. I would get into my neighbors backyards to play on their swing sets and dig holes in their gardens for my grand idea of being able to tunnel underneath the neighborhood to the park. There was definitely nothing wrong with this in my little child mind. Why wasn't I allowed to pick flowers from the neighbors gardens? I was going to give them my beautiful bouquets anyway… well leave it on their doorsteps and run away. And to me, nobody minded a cute little girl doing cute little girl things, so what in the heck was the problem? Years later a next door neighbor would ask my mother what poison she could use on her fertilizer to keep our cats off of her lawn… thank goodness I wasn't my wandering self when we became neighbors.
My favorite thing to do on any average day in our townhouse neighborhood was explore. This often entailed making secret hideouts behind bushes, under decks, in sheds, etc. Never my own of course, that was no fun. Once me and my mother were in a Kmart together at a young enough age that I don't remember this ever happening. My mother strolled me through the isles of the store. I like to think that she was picking out shampoo for me in this story, the kind that has the plastic cartoon character as a top (a very important factor if my mother expected me to use it). She was picking out the different choices, Ariel or Goofy, and turned around to ask me my favorite. She said, "Hon, what do you…" but I was gone. She had never even left me, but I was gone. She looked up and down the isles but I was still nowhere to be found. My mother panicked and found a manager right away. They paged me over the intercom, sent employees looking everywhere, and then finally shut down the entire store so no one could leave with my mothers most precious possession.
When my mother tells this story now, it's with sarcasm and resentment at how I inconvenienced the entire world of Kmart all over the country. As if I remembered or knew that running away was bad at 2 years old. All of a sudden the story takes a twist from kidnapped concern to "BAD girl, BAD!"
As my mother and all fifteen Kmart employees were in a panic trying to find me and debating on calling the police, somebody noticed something. I don't know if it was my mother or a Kmart employee, but I was found by one of them. These are inexistent now, but there used to be a photo filmstrip drop off container in every grocery and convenience store. You could drop off your camera's film and the next day you could pick it up at the counter. Disposable cameras were everybody's actual camera in the 90's. So in a way, my mothers nightmare can never ever be repeated for another parent… because photo drop-off bins don't exist anymore.
Somebody heard me giggling. Somebody was walking by the photo drop-off bin. And somebody noticed that the cabinet was slightly open. Well, whoever it was flew open the cabinet door to reveal a little girl in over alls sitting in the photo drop box. Not only was a sitting there with a big fat smile on my face, but I was in the process of unrolling a film strip. "Hi Mommy!" is apparently what I said. I had caused the entire store to shut down and my mother to cry over her missing daughter because I had wandered off into la la loo la adventure land of mysterious quests… which happened to be the photo drop-box.
To this day my mother uses the same what-if situation, "What if she had been unrolling someones WEDDING PHOTO'S?!?!!?" Well, we contacted the owners of the film and they ended up being good sports about it. No cherished memories had been unrolled. I was probably taken home and punished, but thank goodness I don't remember that part either.
I had many run-away adventures in my youth. I once ran away to the local YMCA, an odd choice but a magical one. I wandered off in Disney World (a story for the books), libraries, parks, and various countless amusement parks. A friend of mine once told me that they were going to probe me and bring a laptop with them so they could locate me at all times because my sense of direction was so terrible. Thank God that the 2000's brought google maps. And my parents gave me a GPS as a graduation present. The point is, I am a lost little girl.
But back to me bettering my mothers life. Not only was a I great at running away and getting lost, I looked just fine in costume. I was decked out entirely in a pink tutu, pink leotard, ballet slippers while also being accessorized with a wand in hand, pink pipe cleaner tiara on my head, and sheer fairy wings on my back with elastic straps under my arm pits at all times. I was princess and that was that. And I loved to tell anybody who would listen.
So I went door to door telling the world of my royalty, singing my made up songs that chorused "I'm a fairy princess! I'm a fairy princess! I'm a FAIRY princess!" all around my neighborhood. The terrifying problem with this was that I often knocked on strangers doors just to tell them that I was a princess and did they have any kids that wanted to play? Well, Newark, Delaware isn't exactly the kind of place that appreciated fairy princesses. It did however appreciate poverty, child molesters, cancer, and inappropriate teacher-students relationships. This is why that knocking on my neighbors doors scared the carp out my parents. While we loved living in Delaware my parents were very aware of it's problems. Hence the move to Unionville, Pennsylvania where small town farm community met Beverly Hills Housewives with subtle BANG.
But, maybe, just this ONE TIME, I can say "you're welcome" to my mother for my philandering. One day, adorned head to toe in princess gear, I knocked on my neighbors door two doors down from my own townhouse. A rather tall woman with thick black hair answered the door and looked all the way down to gaze at my tiara'd head. "Hi, I live down the street at that house" (point to my house) "You have a dog right? Can I pet him?" Well, I don't remember if I got to pet the dog. I do remember being marched right back to my house down the street and my mother answering the door in tears. "You found her?! Oh thank God! I'm sorry, she does this all the time… it's a problem we're going to fix. Where did you say you lived?" And that was how my mother met her best friend, Debra Crossan. That was also how my older sister met her best because Debra had a daughter her age and they got on like peas and carrots. Our families became very close throughout the years. To this day the Crossan's make us cookies on Christmas. Debra started calling me "Lou Lou Belle" because I liked to skip and sing the nursery rhyme down the sidewalk. Lou Lou Belle turned into Lou Belle, which turned into Lou, which now I've decided to adopt the name Belle. My mother stopped calling me any version of the name when a kid at the pool asked what my name was and I honestly said Lou Lou Belle.
Little does my mother realize that the idea of being a "princess" brought her a lifetime of friendship. That my constant demand of always wearing pink made her life full of reward. That princesses made the world a slightly better place to live in. Well, she doesn't see it that way when you account for all the heart-attacks, tears, and frustration over my "episodes."
But I think, deep down, she's glad that she had all those years of rescuing her princess. It was only the beginning of a long life of singing and dancing and skipping to the lou, and who wouldn't love a lifetime of THAT?
