Where are you, Jamie Lynn Drury?

I am not good at making friends.

I try to be friendly with everyone -- even strangers, when there's a good vibe there. But for some reason, it seems to take me a long time to go from friendly to friend.

Just ask Star/Guinevere. I think it was a good three months of seeing her twice a week before we actually knew each other well enough and got together just to hang out before we considered each other friends. Guinevere, however, can make a new friend in 10 minutes. She did so recently, in front of the library, when she and another mom showed up at the same time to find the library closed. So they went shopping together at the store next door and exchanged phone numbers. What drives me crazy about this is -- it turns out I have met this same woman and her baby three times already!

I have seen moms at Baby and Me class form bonds, hug, go out to lunch and host parties at their homes. I see them pair up at the mall. It just makes me feel rejected. Defective. And jealous, too, I suppose. What do they have that I don't? Maybe I'm just not as trusting as most other people? Maybe there is some latent shyness in my character?

Or maybe friendship means so much more to me than just that phone call, that kiss on the cheek when meeting, that playdate, that MySpace-era friend collecting to see who can get the most people to say they like you. When I make a friend, I feel it is forever (or unfortunately in the case of too many people I have befriended, at least until you move away and stop returning my calls, e-mails and letters). I have friends going way back....

My first friend was two years old. I was four. We lived next door to each other (when I was visiting my father and stepmother on weekends and in the summer). She was sassy and fun. As we grew up together, we made up games. We built a fort. I rolled backward down her front steps in her Big Wheel and cut my lip for the first time. I tried curling her impossibly straight blond hair with a curling iron and got a little too close to her scalp, so she sang, "Refry my brain, refry my brain!" to the tune of the Go-Go's song We Got the Beat. We had sleepovers all the time, and we'd talk about boys. We'd ride bikes together all over the neighborhood. We went trick-or-treating together, some years, like the year she put on a garbage bag and her older sister's belt and went as a punk rocker. Every time she had a birthday party, it was a chance to play Bingo at her kitchen table and walk a line with a potato balanced on the flat side of a butter knife. When we were dragged to the supermarket with her mother or my stepmom, we'd pretend to speak a foreign language. We pretended we were actually 10 years older than we were, and that we lived together in an apartment like Laverne and Shirley. We got into arguments almost every day, but we always made up.

Then I moved away. I remember writing but not getting a response back. New friends came into my life, but as they say, you never forget your first.

I don't know if my friend Jamie and I would still be friends if I hadn't moved away. It's possible we would have drifted apart as so many childhood friends do when they become teens and take separate paths. But of course I will always remember her.

Maybe Jamie moved away too, and is living a glamorous life in a city. Or maybe she is a mom now, with her own mom friends. Maybe she thinks about me once in a while. Maybe someday she'll Google her name and find this post, and contact me.

I am not good at making friends. And that might be why I think about Jamie from time to time.

I hope Fly will grow a friendship like the one I had with Jamie -- someone to make memories with and become a real person with. I also hope he doesn't stop there and is better at making friends than I am. The world can be an unfriendly place. But if you're the kind who can make friends quickly, the world is a lot more friendly, and life is a lot less lonely.