My Best Friend by Julie Loucks Spencer

Oh my gosh! I'm so excited to see this. One of my friends found a copy of our 8th grade yearbook where my very first published work was located.

This was published in 1988 in our Flushing (Michigan) Junior High yearbook. Yeah, good times.

Those last few verses about high school must have been added after the fact because my original poem ended with "If ever there should be an end."

The frustrating thing is that my name is not even listed as the author. Maybe that’s not a bad thing since this is the cheesiest poem ever written.

My best friend, Amy and I remember when I wrote this. I was on an airplane flying to Florida to spend the summer with my grandma. Amy and I were inseparable back then, and I knew I was going to miss her somethin' fierce, so I wrote this poem!

I wonder if anyone remembers the novel I wrote that year? I know Amy remembers because we’ve talked about it in recent years. I scrawled the story as fast as I could on notebook paper, ripped the sheet out of my notebook, barely looking up from my writing, and passed the page to the person next to me, and they would read it and pass it on and on and on. I wonder if any of the teachers remember that? Or why they didn’t put a stop to it? And how on earth did I pass eighth grade? And (gulp) why did I throw that manuscript away?

The Kindle app on my phone sure makes reading easier now! Oh, and thank the maker for word processors! When I first started using Microsoft Works (yes, Works, for those of you who are too young to know, that was the predecessor to Word), I thought it was a gift from the writing gods. I now probably spend more time with Microsoft Word than I do with my husband. He should probably be jealous…

---