EVERETT — Well before the first bell at Everett High rang last Wednesday, Tad Cox and Breanne Sommer were where they have been the last 13 years on the first day of school.
The lifelong friends and their moms settled into a booth at Karl’s Bakery on Wetmore Avenue in downtown Everett, laughing at old photos that rekindled childhood memories over chocolate-glazed doughnuts.
Many families have first-day-of-school rituals, be it French toast with strawberry jam or a photo for the family album with kids in stiff new jeans and backpacks bulging with school supplies in front of the backyard fir tree.
For Cox and Sommer, both 17, it has been an annual early morning rendezvous at the bakery since kindergarten. Cox sips hot chocolate and Sommer orders milk to go along with their pastries.
For their moms, Debbie Cox-Powell and Kathy Sommer-Good, last Wednesday was all part of a bittersweet rite of passage. Both young adults are the babies of their families. Their last first day was one of the first last days before they must let go.
“It’s sad,” Cox-Powell said. “I don’t want to do this.”
While the high school seniors are good friends, the moms are best friends.
They met at Little League games while they were pregnant with their youngest children.
Sommer was born about a week before Cox. The pair attended preschool, elementary school, middle school and high school together.
The families supported each other, through the death of Sommer-Good’s first husband and through Cox-Powell’s divorce.
When Cox-Powell was laid off from Boeing and returned to school to learn medical transcription more than a dozen years ago, Sommer-Good quizzed her on medical terminology while they took long walks. She also became Cox’s baby sitter through elementary and middle school.
The annual trip to Karl’s was a time to reflect on where all the time has gone. The array of photos showed Sommer once taller than Cox, but he’s since shot past her after a growth spurt in high school.
As seniors, Sommer became a cheerleader and Cox is working after school as a supermarket courtesy clerk.
They hang out in different circles of friends, but they say they will always consider themselves close.
As they thumbed through the photos and relived their childhoods, the conversation drifted to one photo in particular as it inevitably does.
It is referred to as “the photo.”
The photo Sommer carried in her binder through middle school.
The photo Cox has rued, although not entirely convincingly, since the day in elementary school it was taken.
The photo that is a testament to their childhood friendship, evidence of just how far Cox would go to be a friend.
The image appears to be of three young girls in dresses and makeup.
On closer inspection, one of them looks like a younger version of Cox.
“I could pretty much make him do whatever I wanted,” Sommer laughed. “I would make him have tea parties and I got him to dress up. He’s always been a real sport.”
Today, Sommer is on the high school yearbook staff and the photo remains at her disposal.
“I still regret it to this day,” Cox said, smiling.
As he finished his doughnut, Cox admonished his mom, again not particularly persuasively, that she’d better not get too emotional the day he steps forward in cap and gown to accept his diploma.
“If I hear you blubbering in the crowd, I’m leaving,” he told her.
Cox-Powell can make no such promises to her son.
Getting through a last laughter-filled first-day-of-school visit to Karl’s Bakery was hard enough.
Reporter Eric Stevick: 425-339-3446 or e-mail stevick@heraldnet.com.
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