52 New Friends

Taryn was a sickly child.   Early on, the doctors realized she was allergic to eggs, peanuts and corn.   Think about that.   Almost everything Americans eat contains some form of eggs, peanuts and corn.   And it wasn’t just a small allergy.   As a child, Taryn remembers ingesting any form of corn would literally make her skin burn.   It was like her body rejected the one thing that would nourish her:   food. Luckily, her mom loves to cook.   Twenty years ago, there were few options for those with food allergies but Taryn’s mom found clever substitutions.   And slowly, the skinny kid became stronger.   The food allergies didn’t go away but Taryn learned how to manage them.   By the time she was in junior high, Taryn didn’t feel like the sickly kid she used to be…and she wasn’t. Taryn’s older sister had always been in dance so when the older sister expressed interest in belly dancing, Taryn’s mom decided Taryn would also ben...

Emily is a good girl.   She grew up in a Christian home in San Diego and met her husband while he was stationed there.   He’s a small town boy from Missouri.   She admits he doesn’t talk very much, as country boys tend to be on the quieter side, but the pair shares the same values.   They love Jesus and more than anything Emily wants to create a home that is comfortable for them, their families and their friends.    They married when Emily was twenty-three and they tried living in Missouri for a while.   Being from San Diego, Emily wasn’t a fan of the humidity and cold winters.   Her husband isn’t a fan of big cities, but Queen Creek, Arizona seems to be the best of both worlds.   The desert climate is nice most of the year and although Queen Creek does have a lot of the city’s amenities, it is still far enough outside of Phoenix to have ample farmland and horse property that make Emily’s husband feel right at home. For the most p...

Gigi wanted to meet up and do something fun so I suggested Rustler’s Rooste, a cowboy-themed restaurant with amazing views.  She’d lived in Phoenix her entire life and had never been there.  Looking around as the cotton candy and balloon animals were passed from table to table, Gigi proclaimed the restaurant wasn’t a place where a little Mexican girl would normally go.  Gigi’s father is Caucasian and her mother is Mexican…but she wasn’t the only person of color in the restaurant that night.  I thought the statement was odd. Gigi was recommended to me through another friend.  Physically, she is a solid woman but even dressed down in a tshirt and jeans, I could see she had a loveliness buried under a hard exterior.  Of course, none of that was my first impression.  The first thing I noticed was that when she sat across from me, even though the table was very small, she seemed very far away.  I babble when I’m nervous and in an effort to mak...

Sean was one of fourteen children born to his parents.   It was a crowded, chaotic household, but it was still filled with a lot of love.   When he was a kid, he used to collect bottles from his neighbors so he might be able to turn them in for enough money to buy candy.   It was a rather ingenious scheme until his mother got wind of it.   She grounded him saying that begging for bottles made the family look poor.   But they were poor.   There were a lot of mouths in the house to feed.   All of Sean’s clothes were hand-me-downs and he was grateful for the half of one drawer he was given to store his things in the bedroom he shared with his brothers. After the stint with bottle collecting, Sean’s mother decided he was old enough to follow in the footsteps of his older brothers and allowed him to take on a paper route.   Sean used it, as his brothers had before him, to build relationships with the homeowners and to stake out a market he could...

Five years ago, Jennifer was a music teacher in Indiana who wanted to change her school, but because there were no shortage of music teachers in Indiana, that was a very difficult thing to do.   She had just started dating a guy she really liked when she found out he was being forced to relocate to Arizona for a job.   Spurred on at the notion of losing the guy, Jennifer looked for a job as a music teacher in Arizona and to her surprise, she found one.   The couple continued to date after they both moved to Arizona.   Eventually, they moved in together and got engaged.   And if the story had ended there, I could have said that was the most daring thing Jennifer had ever done, that she had a nice, quiet life. But these are the times when being a teacher in Arizona has become synonymous with being a revolutionary.   Jennifer has seen firsthand how programs have been cut and how students’ education has suffered at the lack of funding in our Arizona sch...