In grade school, I wanted desperately to have a best friend. I knew girls who had piano lessons, dance, modeling, swim classes. I did none of those things. My best First Grade friend moved away and for a long time I had friends, but no one “best.”

Ann’s dad was a merchant seaman and would be gone for weeks or months at a time. When he came home, the entire family stayed home together. Her parents, Ann, and her twin sisters, Hilary and Teresa. And then there might be a party, someone’s birthday, a clutter of little girls running about. Her mother was cheerful; her dad too. The kitchen ceiling was painted red and the house too small for five people, smaller even than mine. In the cupboards were candies with rice paper wrappers, salted plums, and pickled, sour fruits her father brought back from Asia. Ann was the tallest girl in our class at Echo Lake Elementary, blond and kind. She loved horses as much as I did. We played “Horses” in the playground at recess, galloping and making horse noises. In the summer I was seven, we played games of Monopoly that went on and on. I was better at the game and had to lend her money so that we could keep playing in my bedroom. Ann lived across the street from our school. Even now I could draw a map from my house to hers, past Carmen’s house and Stephanie’s, through the low chainlink gate at the back of her house, past the willow tree and swing-set, to that red ceilinged kitchen. On my map I could place the homes of Carol and Denise and Gail who once had a newborn lamb in her front yard, the street where I found the “lost” kitten my mother made me take from house to house till I found the owner, the farmhouse built fifty years before our three-bedroom, one bath ranch on a gravel road. Down the street was a pasture with a cow. There were woods with the car-sized rotting stumps from old growth cut when my grandfather was young. A tiny house rotting too. Swampy places that sometimes froze over in winter and had pollywogs in the spring. Frogs so loud in the dusk we could hardly hear ourselves talk.

I went looking for Ann online. I don’t remember her middle name. The biggest hurdle looking for any woman you knew as a child is that they mostly change their last name. It’s one reason I didn’t change mine. My dad was a research librarian for the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries. There was a twice widowed Scottish woman who had published under her own name as a graduate student and then, at least as I recall, under two or three married names, which meant that her work was all over the library. My father disapproved. She might at least have used one professional name, he complained, but instead she took her husbands’.

There are a lot of Ann Dawsons in the world. Most of them are dead, it seems. I found plenty of memorials for women who died at age 93 or 87. Ann would be 71 now. I think her birthday was in the spring. She’s undoubtedly been married and changed her last name and, having sisters, would not have male relatives with Dawson as a last name. I don’t know what her last name might be.

Even when the last name is unusual (I’ve never met another Renaldi) it’s not easy to know which one you might want. There are a few Jan Priddys in the world. I am not the precept Jan or the one in England. I am the one with running results, the one who writes, who was once a teacher. I am not on Facebook or Instagram. I am not related to the Priddys in Oklahoma or Texas. So far as I know, I have no relatives in the small town of Priddy in the UK. But the only change to my name was dropping the parts my childhood friends would not have known.

That’s one reason I lost track of most of my oldest friends: Ginger, Connie, Steph, Gail, Carmen. Ann. Connie turned out to be meaner as a teenager than I remembered from when we were little and she moved away to California, and meaner still when we found one another on Facebook a few years ago. It’s yet another reason I left Facebook.

Gary went to school with a sibling of Ginger’s so it might be possible to track her down? Stephanie surely isn’t a “Renaldi” anymore, though there are several women with that name including one in France. Denise has been married three times and, like the Scottish salmon researcher, she changed her name each time she married. She lived in southern Oregon last time I checked. Her mother Joyce and my mother Fay were friends, so I heard all about her marriages, divorces, homes and disappointments. I imagine she heard about my life too. She had wanted to be popular when we were young and later to marry money, and she did marry money, but by the end, with money her goal, she earned more in a single year than I ever did in two, and was married for her money.

I don’t know what happened to Ann.