Category Archives: Tributes

I am so happy to spend time with the BBFFs.  I always see their travels and photos but this time I witnessed them and they are so much fun to be with!  I asked the help of Marlu as they can best explain their friendship!  I wish I had a friendship like theirs – Imagine 37 years and 4 best friends!   I am going to see if I can form one now!! haha!! 🙂  Hopefully we will see more of the BBFFs here at Heart2Heart 

Here are photos by Anette ( one of the BBFFs ).  They even have a mascot called Schubbee that travels with them wherever they go!  So cute!! I love how they document their time together!

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The BBFFs

Thank you, Rica, for giving the BBFFs this space to talk a bit about our 37-year friendship that’s so tight we decided that BFF wasn’t enough to describe ourselves, we added an extra “B” such that the acronym spells out as Bestest Best Friends Forever!  Of course it’s ungrammatical but our friendship transcends grammar rules.

We all got acquainted with each other when we were sophomores in high school.  Jenny Litton Navasero and I had been in the Assumption since Prep but Dina De Jesus Campos and Annette Palaypay Lewallen were new girls from Maryknoll (now Miriam) and St. Scholastica’s respectively.  Dina and I bonded almost instantly because we were both sporty and even had the same gym shoes!  By the time we were juniors, the four of us were part of a bigger group of seven.  I’d say it wasn’t until we were in college that the quad came to be.  Jenny, Dina and I found ourselves in UP Diliman.  While Annette had gone to De La Salle University, we would somehow find ways to be together like going on trips to Baguio and the beach or organizing what used to be considered “parties ng bayan” in Jenny’s house.  When Jenny and Dina moved to the UP Manila campus for their dentistry proper, they naturally saw more of Annette.  We would keep in touch regularly even before cell phones and the Internet (we all have bundles of letters to prove that) so you can just imagine how we’ve optimized today’s technology.

Eventually, we got married, had kids and built our careers.  We wouldn’t see each other as often but we always knew where the others were.  Recently, in fact, we discussed the “gaps” in our friendship and these were mostly the years when we were very busy raising the children.  So now that most of them are grown, we can spend much time with each other again.  And we’ve also become godmothers to each other’s children so we’ve even sealed the friendship with kinship!

I would say that our 25^th high school anniversary in 2003 was a turning point.  Annette came home after 20 years for our velada and it was so uncanny how we all just picked up where left off (like we just parted ways yesterday!).  And it’s always like that.  Whenever we see each other, it seems like there is never any passage of time or space.  In fact, we even repeat the same stories and jokes, sometimes dating back from high school, and we laugh so loud you’d think it was the first time we heard it!  Now, try to visualize that in text format which happened just last night while we were on group Viber!  And you haven’t even heard the nicknames we have for each other…

When we turned 50 last year, instead of throwing parties, we all decided to travel together. 

We had so much fun that we did it again this year!  When the four of us cannot be all together, there’s Facebook to link us and to experience everything vicariously – our mini reunions with other classmates, family gatherings, career milestones, good news, bad news and sad news.  Not to mention the benefits of email, Skype, texting, phone calls and even snail mail from time to time!  Really, when you think about it, there is no reason in the world NOT to keep in touch with friends!

We have thousands of BBFF photos but we are only guests on Rica’s blog so here are a few that we hold dear to our hearts.  We hope that there are many of you out there who are also as lucky as us to have the Bestest Best Friends Forever and ever in the universe!

Marlu Villanueva Balmaceda

16 October 2012

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