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This is first person I remember, who was a girl, who befriended me.  At the time, we lived in Overbrook Park, which is at the western edge of Philadelphia.  Debbie lived down the street from us and we went to the same elementary school.  I was only 4 years old when I started Kindergarten, turned 5 not very long thereafter.  I was a bit younger than most of my classmates but that was how they assigned grades back in those days.  This was an age, for me, when the difference between reality and imagination wasn’t as strong as it is today.  I could take a couple of pencils or pipe cleaners, tie them together and make an airplane and play for hours making airplane sounds, diving in and out of the clouds.  At this stage of my life, I was really living what was inside my head.  My strongest memory of those days was flying.  Whether it was Commando Cody, Superman or Mighty Mouse, I put myself there and I could fly. 

Commando Cody was my all-time favorite childhood hero.  He was a fellow who strapped a jet pack on his back and flew around chasing bad guys.  What made him special and what let me relate to him was that he was ordinary.  He wasn’t a superhero, just a hero with some really cool technology. He had no special powers, just his wits and fists.  In theory, with that jet pack, anybody could fly like him.  I spent countless hours imaging just that.  I would build little models of him out of plastic building blocks that came long before Legos.  I’d fly them around.  I built replicas of his spaceship and I’d fight aliens and bad guys in my mind. 

Back in Kindergarten, my mom had bought me a Mighty Mouse T-shirt, complete with sewn-in red cape and I thought nothing of wearing it to school; after all, Mighty Mouse was also one of my heroes.  If you ran around fast enough, the cape would flap in the breeze, just like on the cartoon.  Because I was so young and rather shy, I didn’t go out of my way to make friends.  I was perfectly happy flying around my classroom by myself, imagining myself above the clouds.  One time, Debbie Perlish wore a Mighty Mouse T-shirt the same day as me and love was born, or at least something like it.  We would fly around the classroom in perfect synchrony oblivious to the process of socialization that underlies the concept of Kindergarten.  We had a wonderful time together but in the end, I don’t think her gender was relevant.  I think had it been a boy who showed up in his Mighty Mouse T-shirt, I would have been just as interested.  Debbie Perlish just happened to be a girl and it taught me early on that girls weren’t so bad.  Later in life, all of my best friends were female.  It’s kind of embarrassing to talk to males about matters of the heart.  With girls, it was never a problem. Maybe it started here. 

My memory of Debbie Perlish has faded to the point that I would not recognize her even if I saw her.  But I have always been curious as to what happened to her; how her life turned out.  I would love to see her again and find out if the connection we shared back then was as important to her as it was to me. To this day, I wonder if it was just my imagination or whether it was something more.  I think back to those days with great fondness.  They were simple and happy.  And I could fly.