The Nature of Friendships

My Gathering Girls group--seven of us who spun out selves off from an official, monthly event down at the senior hall for people looking for friends---has been meeting twice a month for brunch since last May. And occasionally we’ve gotten together to do other things around the community. I was worried we wouldn’t hold together over the winter because the weather here in Michigan puts a kink in everything we do and, sadly, our ages are also playing into the equation. One of our ladies has breathing issues and is resisting going on oxygen, another has back issues so these two often bow out of going places that requires a little walking. Another in our group is starting dialysis and doesn’t know how that’s going to affect her free-to-gather time and we have another who just this week joined the Widows’ World where the rest of us have been living for a long time.

The ladies mentioned above are on average ten years older than the three of us not mentioned. Once this winter it was just we ‘youngsters’ who showed up for brunch. And someone commented that our absence friends are a cautionary tale telling us that we need to keep moving, keep having fun together for as long as we can because when we see what they are going through with heath issues we are looking at ourselves in ten years. And since dark humor is often served at our brunches we joked about having to go back to the senior hall to troll for more friends to entice into our group if it gets too small. That led to a discussion about how friends come and go through-out our lives for various reasons---some moving on literally, other moving on metaphorically as we grow in different directions. “All our lives we’ve had to keep making new friends,” someone said. And that’s never easy to do whether in grade school or at the senior hall. 

I’ve been lucky that I’ve had two best friends in my life. One I met in kindergarten and we were best friends until she got married after college and moved out of state, but over the years we’ve stayed in touch first through letters and now with email. I must say, though, at one time I resented her husband for taking her away from me. I missed having a best friend in my life until Don came along and took on that role. Now, looking back I wonder if N.B. and I had lived in the same city all this time how that might have affected our relationships with our husbands. We taught each other how to be best friends and we transferred what we learned to being best friends with our spouses. Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think it’s possible to have two best friends at the same time. And a spouse will usually (and rightly so) come first because you’re building a family and life together. I say “usually” because I’ve known a few women who have giggled, cried, plotted, and passed more secrets back and forth with their girlfriends than with their spouses. I’m guessing their marriages weren’t all they could have been because, in my book, spouses who are best friends have the best marriages. Still, no one can be everything to another person so I may be wrong about the ability of people to maintain two best friends at the same time. Oh, I’m so confused! The only thing I know for sure is I ignored the whole issues of maintaining a circle of friends until the loneliness of widowhood drove me to face the fact that I screwed up in thinking I’d never need more than Don. Oops. 

The word ‘friend’ is hard to define without an adjective, isn’t it. We pigeonhole friendships. We have casual friends, work friends, fair weather friends, cyber friends, church friends, common interest friends, family friends, close friends and best friends but what is a friend really? A best friend is easiest to define: it’s a connection that binds our spirits together, an unbreakable trust that we can be ourselves around that person, no matter if our moods are joyful or pitiful. Best friends can talk about anything and trust one another not to past on anything personal or told in confidence. They know where all our bones are buried, know our strengths and weaknesses and they only use that knowledge to help us be the best version of ourselves. 

Monday was my Gathering Girls First Mondays Brunch and only four of the seven of us attended. That makes me so nervous! I don’t want our circle of budding friendships to break up or get smaller before we even get to our first anniversary. And the TED TALK below with life-long friends Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin on the nature of female friendship inspires me to keep trying to building our sisterhood group. Their humor, like that of my Gathering Girls, comes together like peanut butter and jelly---so natural and easy---and I don’t want to lose that! O. Henry said, "No friendship is an accident” which is probably another way of saying, we have to work at maintaining our friendships. Okay, that’s my summer marching orders. Again. It was the same last summer and look what I’ve gained in the trying...and how much more I can gain if I keep on trying! ©

Two Little Words and a Cranky Widow

I was picking up lunch at Wendy’s in between Zumba Class and getting my new hubcap---that really isn’t a hubcap---installed on my car when I got annoyed at myself for thanking the guy at the first drive-up window for giving me my change. Am I the only one who still remembers when service people thanked you for your business? I hate it when I feel compelled to “close the deal” with the obligatory 'thank you' when people at takeout windows fail to say it. That's the way I was taught to do it in my teens when I was on the other side of the retail counter but kids, today, seem to be trained to believe customers should thank them for taking time away from their flirting with co-workers to wait on us. At the second Wendy’s window, as a girl handed me a junior bacon cheeseburger she said, "Have a nice day!” Oh...why didn't I think of that? I’m on the way to a funeral but I’ll try to have a nice day. My house is going into foreclosure but I’ll try to have a nice day. A friend is getting his leg amputated today but I’ll try to have a fricking nice day! Okay, I’m going to pretend I didn’t write this paragraph because I’m starting to sound like a crotchety old woman who beats puppies with her cane, begins every other sentence with “in MY day," and stir-fries kittens for dinner.

I didn’t go to a funeral that day and my mortgage was paid off two years ago but the son-in-law of my best friend was getting his leg amputated while I was at Wendy's. The patient, a young guy with twin toddlers and a daughter a few years older, has been cancer free for four years but the surgery to replace his thigh bone with a cadaver bone never healed. His only hope for a normal life, not dictated by pain management was to amputate. As sad as his plight has been, it’s also been a joy to see my friend’s amazing and supportive core family, extended family and church family all pulling together to support his daughter and son-in-law through it all. There are, of course, other families around like his but we don’t always appreciate their specialness or say out loud, “Thank you! Thank you for living your faith and values even when times are hard. Thank you for passing those values on to everyone in your sphere of influence. Thank you for being the best of the best role models." My husband and I always thought of our friend as the son we wished we’d had and it’s been a long time since I’ve told him that. Note to self: Do it soon! I’m not getting any younger. 

I don’t know, maybe hearing a string of insincere thank-yous at takeout windows dilutes their meaning when it comes to expressing heart-felt feelings so deep they make you teary-eyed just thinking about them....but I doubt it. How else do we express appreciation for everything from a stranger picking up something you dropped to a friend being the awesome person that he is? An online dictionary says ‘thank you’ is used “for telling someone that you are grateful for something said or done” but shouldn’t there be degrees of ‘thank you’---little thank-yous for takeout windows and huge THANK-YOUS when someone makes a real difference in their world?  Ya, I know, that's what adjectives are for, Jean! I can say, "A supercalifragilisticexpialidocious thank you, T.C.!"  Oops, I don’t think I used that word correctly but I have a strict rule that I only look up one word per blog entry so hit me with your best admonishment if supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is not a proper adjective.

The Dalia Lama is fond of saying, “The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness.” I believe that. I believe we need to acknowledge goodness when we see it. I believe goodness is all around us, even in our darkest hours. And I believe few of us say the big thank yous as often as we should. They're such little words but if you believe the Dalia Lama they help the seeds of humanity grow. They make us feel appreciated, that's for sure, and they're probably needed more in the world today than ever before. So here I am writing this sugar shower to the son I wish I had to thank him for the things mentioned above and for having such a goofy sense of humor that he lights up every room he enters and for being the one and only person who would unabashedly cry with me after Don died.

Thank you to everyone still reading this essay. You may be interested in knowing I've made a promise not rag on myself the next time I say "thank you" at a takeout window. I'll just practice saying it small, no adjective needed. You may also be interested in knowing I have no funny or wise words to end this 'Sunday Sermon' but I do want to assure cats lovers that I could never, ever get hungry enough to stir-fry kittens. ©

Getting Ready for the Big Reunion

My oldest friend in the whole world is coming to visit me in October. We met early in grammar school and we were best friends from that first day until we went off to separate colleges. It wasn’t long after that when she met and married my replacement in the `best friend and confidant’ department and they moved across the country. We haven’t seen each other in---wow---well over a decade! But you never forget your first best friend. We did everything together from playing on the “monkey bars” during recess to walking to the corner drugstore for after school malts to taking part in some of the world’s first cruise nights at MacDonald’s. As adults we kept in touch though infrequent letters and visits but whenever we’d get together we always had the ability to pick up where we left off, finding lots of things to talk about and laugh about even though our lives had taken dramatically different directions. And so it shall be again this October. In the meantime I have a long list of things on my ‘To Do List’ to get ready for her visit including the following….

1) Lose 599 pounds. Well, maybe that’s a tad ambitious so I’ll settle for losing the six pounds I gained since I saw my doctor last spring. My appointment with him is the day before the Big Reunion and he won’t be happy about my weight gain. I could tell him it’s a common widowhood by-product but he’s immune to my excuses.

2) Redecorate the entire house. It hasn’t been redone since we moved in eleven years ago and it looks like a decorator with a multiple personality disorder did the job. Maybe a redo is little ambitious, too, so I’ll settle on deep cleaning the guest room. It’s only been used two times since we built the house…unless you count the collection of spaghetti poodles living in there. I might have to make a cover for their ‘glass cage’ so their 75 pair of laughing eyes don’t spook my friend and keep her up at night.

3) Learn to cook. My friend has a long history in the culinary arts starting back to when she was a kid learning her way around the kitchen from her home economics teacher mom. Today, she belongs to a couple groups that test recipes and have frequent dinner parties to celebrity their joy of cooking. Me? Don and I had a long history of eating out in restaurants and my kitchen skills are all but none existent. The idea of doing any cook while she’s here freaks me out more than anything I’ve had to do since Don passed away. But my friend assures me it won’t be a big deal. We can live on grilled cheese sandwiches and big lunches out. Still, if that doesn’t work out maybe I can teach her the Joys of Take-Out Italian? We have a great place near-by.

4) Get a face lift, a stomach tuck, and the gray hair vanished from my head so my friend might be able to recognize me when I pick her up at the airport. Oh, heck, that’s not going to happen either so I’ll have to come up with something straight out of the movies like wearing a red carnation.

5) Teach the dog not to greet newcomers by jumping on them when they enter the house. Darn it, if you knew Levi you’d say it would easier just to teach my friend about pulling her knee up slightly to deflect doggie jumps. She’s not a dog person so spending time with Levi will be a new experience for her. And it seems only fair that she should have something to be apprehensive about since I have the whole cooking thing to worry about.

I could go on writing about my To-Do List but you get the idea. I’m an obsessed planner---some might say ‘obsessed worry-wart.’ One thing I’m not worried about, though, and that's the fact that the Big Reunion in October. is a wonderful distraction. Recently widowed women tend to fall into a trap of thinking we’ll never have anything to look forward to ever again. But I’m starting to realize that transitioning out of the lives we must leave behind due to the death of our husbands is only half the equation. We must also make concrete plans for happier times in the future. ©