friends

Did you know that it's tougher to write a post of rapture than a story of all that went wrong in a day? Creating a narrative around a mishap is delightfully easy: words tumble over each other in their eagerness to find their place on a page. My first thought when I crash or bruise or do something ridiculously ill-fated is -- at the end of the day, this will make for a good story! But to give life to sweet moments, to explain why you feel joy over something seemingly trivial -- now that's difficult.

So I've been thinking about writing this post since yesterday, but in rehearsing the text in my head I almost threw it away. Too saccharine, too mushy, with too many forgettable details that cannot possibly interest anyone but the parties involved. I cannot get it right! Move on! 

But maybe not. This afternoon I came back to it. Fresh off a rather long phone conversation, I decided the time is right to give it a try. Maybe some of it will reverberate and trigger your own thoughts on your own situation. The topic? It's an immensely important one: friends.

The thing is, I don't often write about them. You can't help but sense the great love I have for my family, for Ed. But friends? I keep them to the side of the story. Even as they are so central to my well being!

Our friends are often the people we see on a regular basis. Lunch dates, coffee chats, visits, walks together -- it's what friends do, right? 

But I don't have that luxury. I am 68 years old and I can, by now pinpoint the people who are my close friends and who will likely be my close friends forever. Those whom I would call in a split second in the hope that I could support them in times of need, which happen to be the exact same people I would call or text if my own world was turning into a pile of crap. People who track my life in some detail (and I track theirs). Of that bunch, hardly any live in Madison. So nearly all my friendship building takes place via emails, texts, calls, Zoom visits and the occasional, all too rare, in person visits. I love them all to pieces and if you ask me what I do in those hours when I am not with the kids, or with Ed, when I'm not catching up with daughters or reading the day's reading material --well, chances are I'm with friends. Not in person, but in some form of writing/chatting/connecting with them.

My oldest super friend (honestly, she has superpowers!) is Polish. She's actually a spouse of a college pal. Has that happened to you? Girls and boys, flirting, traveling, palsing around and then bam! Everyone starts to settle down and there are weddings and there are partnerings and you either lose your friends or, as in my case, gain the most wonderful person imaginable! And now she grows to be your close friend, your true friend for the ages. 

I moved to the US in the middle of my university studies. I loved the people I left behind. I didn't really get the American college scene. I was working as an au pair, so I didn't live on campus and the people I met in my classes all spoke a language I could understand, but there it ended. They surely were from another planet. We had very little in common. I traveled back to Poland every chance I got. To be with my pack. But one person in New York stood out for me: a young woman, an American but with a broad gaze, a fellow student who became my best friend. And she remains one of the most important people in my life (she is the one I talked to this morning). For many of you, college years netted you a pool of life long friends. For me -- just this one. But she was (and is) gold. 

Grad school however, was a bust. I fell in love and let go of all my friends in favor of this guy who occupied all my free time and waking and sleeping hours. I walked away with him in my life and in many ways, though we're divorced, he remains a kind of peculiarly friend-at-the-side. I mean,  mixed gender friendships can be weird just by virtue of their mix genderdness (though tell that to my daughter who has among her very best friends a guy). Then add to a mixed gender the fact of a once-spouse-dom, with all the divorce memories thrown in, and you have kind of a strange bag, no? Still, we have some history and so a friend-at-the-side he shall be. No one else from grad school has survived. All gone our separate ways.

Law school -- a last shot at easy friendship formation and here, I got really rich. Two friends who are so close to me that even you, readers, know them, because they are so enmeshed in my life, to the point that we have often traveled together and done things with families when our kids were were tots. These two are superheroes -- they've put up with all the worst of me and I can only hope to be as generous in my gifts to them (of an ephemeral nature) as they have been with me. 

So, school has been my pool. The friends I list are from those days. But Ocean has been a source as well. One Madison female friend came to me also as a spouse of a fellow blogger. He stopped blogging, her friendship stayed. And then there are the three of you out there, in distant parts of the globe, who are my friends since the day you first contacted me because of something I wrote. And you are my friends way beyond Ocean posts now.

In all this mix, friendships endured even though most of them suffered setbacks. When I got married, I "dropped" Poland. I closed myself off in my new life, and since these were times when only hand written mail kept you connected, well -- for many, many years, we all sort of ignored each other. (And then picked up again with email, and travel, and all those modern technologies that make it so easy to stay close to people you want to stay close to.) My college friend for the ages? Well, somewhere in the last decade or two, we let go of our phone calls that had sustained me for so, so long. I was sure I had just been too big a handful for her. But maybe it was simply a pause and a reset. Maybe we needed to figure out what's next, now that the kids were grown. And yes, even with my two law school heroes -- we dropped back for a few years, and then resumed.

You'll just say -- these things ebb and flow. But I think when you are younger, you grapple with what it means to be a friend and it takes you a while to figure out that the requirements change over time. You need to adjust.

And while I'm on this topic, let me be clear: some slides never recovered. Have I ever told you about friendships that failed? Oh my God. The handful of anti-success stories. The woman who was my best friend during my teaching years, who then stopped being my best friend for reasons known only to her. My students -- some were really good pals in their years after graduating, but, well, they grew up into busy lives and the connection is there, but you know, its strength lies in mutual respect rather than actual conversation. And friends that came out of my ex-husband's porthole: such good friends they were, but once I divorced, they chose him over me. Honestly, from those married years, my ex is the only one who survived as anything even resembling a "friend." That's okay: with Ed came a new crew. Not too large, but a wonderful handful of people who keep telling me that I've changed the guy, which is funny because Ed is actually unchangeable. 

So today I talked with my college friend. And that was my morning. And later, I texted with my law school friends and I emailed my Polish friend and emailed my Ocean friend. And this is how it works for me now -- this world of closeness that makes me feel so good and rids me of any reasons to complain about anything. They people are rock solid and I love them tremendously, totally.

And the above? Those are chickens. Not my pals. Just chickens. Though lately they seem to have developed their own tight little circle of cheeperettes. They're not sibs, not offspring, not even cousins. But tied to each other by heartstrings nonetheless. Friends for life, however long or short a chicken's life may be.