Remembering Beth

I learned over the weekend that a friend from high school had passed away - three years ago. I was sad because she had died and I was sad because I hadn't known about it.

We were very close in high school. You know how teenage girls can be - they hang out all over top of one another when they click with somebody. We shared a love of music - she played the piano - and I was a year older than she.

We played together in a Top-40 band, and so we were around one another a great deal. Hours and hours of practice, for one thing, and then the Friday and/or Saturday nights playing bars we weren't old enough to drink in but old enough to play music in.

We also had some interesting adventures together. She was with me when I backed my car into a pole at the market in Blue Ridge, where we'd stopped to by some sodas. Put a nice dent in the car, and I was terribly upset. She laughed it off.

We'd gone out shopping or something one Saturday afternoon, with a gig to play later that night, and on the way home she'd urged me to go the long way - which just happened to take us by a group of Hell's Angel's motorcycle folks who were camped out near Catawba Creek. We wanted to see what it looked like - and had been expressly forbidden by my mother to go that route.

As we drove by the encampment - I don't remember much about what we saw, tents and motorcycles, mostly - I ran over something in the road. I drove as far as I could on a flattening tire and then had to stop. We needed to be home in about an hour to change and go to our music gig. These were the days before cellphones, so we hoofed it up a long driveway and begged to use the phone. I called a friend of my father's and told him where I was, what I needed, and swore him to silence. He came and changed the tire and I limped the car home on the spare. (I learned to change a tire myself after that.) Unfortunately, the damage to the car was more than just a tire - I'd apparently ran over a knife and it ricocheted into the gas tank, cutting a hole in it.

Beth's dad ran an auto shop and he fixed it. I don't know if she ever confessed to our misdeed. I know I didn't, although I think my parents knew. I had called my father's friend, after all.

Our biggest gig was the night we played New Year's Eve at the Hotel Roanoke. This was during the disco era, so we played a lot of disco. Many of the songs I play today are songs I learned from being in the band. We had a repertoire of about 80 songs that we did well. I sang lead on a few of them, to give the lead singer a break occasionally, but mostly I played guitar. Everyone else sang backup and played their instrument.

Beth played an electric piano. She was good at it, and seemed to enjoy the band. I thought we all did.

By that time I was a senior in high school. The band broke up after I graduated (I wasn't the only senior), and I lost touch with Beth and the other band members much more quickly than I would have once thought possible.

I remember one day I passed her car as I was driving from home on some errand. I thought she was coming to see me, and I turned around. But she had not gone to my house. She was dating a guy who lived down the road from me. I had no idea.

Life moved on and while I was aware of where she was and who she was with, we weren't close friends anymore. I spent time with her around 1993 when she taught a self-defense course that I took. She was, as always, in good spirits, a very caring soul who could look at you and tell what you needed without hesitation.

I didn't see her again until I went to her father's funeral visitation in 2011. 

She'd been on my mind recently, so I wrote her aunt to ask for an update.

Her aunt told me she'd passed away. I was stunned. She was younger than I. She was a lively person. She was someone I have fond memories of. She was supposed to be off doing something fun, engaging in a new profession, I thought, since she'd retired already from her first job.

Life does not always turn out as one hopes, dreams, or plans. I have my memories, and that will have to be enough. I have no regrets here - not everyone you meet is meant to be in your life forever and we were never on bad terms with one another - but I would have gone to her funeral if I had known.