The two young girls waited to order ice cream at Jordan’s Snack Bar, all the while giggling, hopping, twirling and hugging each other again and again.

They obviously were best friends – for the time being anyway – and they savored each other as much as the chocolate cones they lapped. The little girl with dark curls and blue eyes, the other with high pigtails her daddy, she said, plaited; oh, how they beamed and hugged, then walked to the van, arms still draped around each other.

That scene could have been re-enacted from my own childhood snapshots. I remember well my first friends, the ones with whom I climbed trees or sold lemonade or played hopscotch or trick or treated.

Their pictures were pasted on a plaque I made in our Brownie troop, my round face being in the center, of course, and theirs circling it. They were my best friends – for the time being anyway.

In fact, “the time being” extended year after year … through elementary school, through junior high, through high school and so far beyond that it’s hardly possible we’d still be hopping up and down, hugging each other. Five first-grade friends who played dress-up in their mothers’ clothes are now – or soon to be – grandmothers.

No one wants to hear about someone else’s school reunion or to watch travel slides or home movies, for that matter. So I won’t embellish the details of our recent weekend together after many years apart except to say the experience was tender, the affection sincere, the shared memories keen.

It doesn’t take a child psychologist to realize the importance of social environment on our early development. We’re indelibly marked by the influences of friends, elementary school teachers, Sunday schools, neighborhoods and, especially, home life.

Yet no more so then than today when youngsters in my town dart out of the grammar school to begin their own summer vacation. They may take for granted the hot lunches they’ve eaten at their desks, the notes they’ve written to each other, the games at recess, the art work they’ve displayed, the lessons they’ve learned, the friends they’ve made.

They may be unaware that a caring community watches as they ride their bikes down the roads or fish from the dock or shoot a basketball in the driveway, that parents and neighbors are keeping a close eye – and an ear – for signs of any trouble ahead.

My first friends and I didn’t know how lucky we were back then until we began exchanging memories of our childhood, regaling one another with tales from 50 years ago.

A very old book I have describes the value of wholesome example on youngsters just like us, and just like those I see everyday in our Down East town. “Sadee, the Persian poet, beautifully depicts the influence of environment in this simple apologue:

“One day as I was in the bath, a friend of mine put into my hand a piece of scented clay. I took it and said to it, ‘Art thou musk or ambergris, for I am charmed with thy perfume?’ It answered, ‘I was a despicable piece of clay, but I was some time in the company of the rose; the sweet quality of my companion was communicated to me, otherwise I should be only a bit of clay, as I appear to be.'”