I grew up in a small town in Georgia. A really small town, we're going to call Lanier. I used to tell people Lanier was so small that if your car was parked in the wrong place for more than 20 minutes, everybody in town knew it, and half of them were on the telephone telling stories (usually scandalous) about what you were doing there.

It was an isolated, nosy and claustrophobic little town, and sometimes I think it ought to have been a crime to raise a child there in the 1950s. But as I've grown older, I've begun to appreciate more fully some of the positive things about growing up in a town like Lanier. Particularly my friends.

My mother, like all the rest of the hatted and gloved and bridge-playing mothers of the children I grew up with, received a photograph of fifteen five year olds posing in Ms.Tigner's Nursery School dressed up in costumes. Indians and cowboys, ghosts and clowns all posing for the camera. I was a clown, by the way.

Those same fifteen children went through, Kindergarten, grammar school, and high school together and graduated in a class of 28 in 1969. We were so close, we didn't even date each other. It would have been like dating your brother or sister.

After high school, each of us went our different directions and returned to Lanier only to attend reunions, funerals or visit relatives. Very few of us remained in the small town that nurtured or stunted our growth, as the case may be.

"But, it's a nice bunch of people." My husband said the first time I took him to one of these reunions. "Wadn't anybody mean or hurtful of trying to outdo anybody. Ya'll just seemed to enjoy each other."

It was true. But, I never really appreciated the extent of the closeness nor the kind of unconditional acceptance that characterized that group of people until a reunion a few years ago.

We were all standing around Gus' enormous kitchen, drinking and talking. Rod admitted he'd smoked marijuana in high school and all the rest of us wanted to know why he never shared it. I carped about the fact that when we elected Superlatives - you know those Miss Lanier High, Mr. Lanier High things. Jamie Woods was elected "wittiest" while I got "cutest." All the rest of the categories were the same for girls and boys, Most Likely to Succeed, etc., but not this one. I guess in 1969, they still just couldn't bring themselves to admit that a girl was witty, she had to be cute.

"What is your problem with this?" Rod asked.

"You been thinking about this for almost thirty years?" Joe Ed teased.

"I'm just not cute, that's all. I don't want to be called cute."

"O.K., O.K." They responded. "You're not cute."

During a lull in the conversation, I leaned over and asked Joe Ed if he was happy. He made an astoundingly tasteless remark. "I'm pussy whipped." He said. "That is a terrible word," I responded narrowing my eyes at him across the table. "And a horrible thing to say."

We were off. The argument lasted at least 20 minutes with various people coming in and out. Finally, when Joe Ed got up to get another beer, he looked over his shoulder at my husband and smiled fondly. "She's always been like that, and in forty-two years, I've never won one argument."

That night in bed, the statement came back to me: She's always been like that. Somebody knew, a whole group of people knew what I'd always been like. Joe Ed and Lauren, Ted, and Rod, Morgan and Michael and the rest - they all knew me from the time I was five. I had lived all over the world, practiced at least six different professions, married men on three continents and still in so many ways I was the same child that stood in Ms.Tigner's Nursery School.