Old Friends
Stories that twine together over years until one can't exist without the other
“Time just deepens, sweetens, And mends old friends” - From the lyric to Old Friends by Coldplay
In This Issue:
It takes a long time to make an old friend
Have you voted yet? Are you ready to vote? Here’s a link to help if you need it.
Finding Zen in Montana only a few miles from home
I have known my best friend, Rae, for forty-five years. I know this because my son was only a few months old when we met in the summer of 1975 at a meeting of our student housing tenant’s committee. I was sweating in the heat, my breasts were still leaking, and my hair hung on either side of my face like drab brown curtains connected by a sawed-off fringe of bangs. Rae, on the other hand, was tall, graceful, and sported a sleek asymmetrical haircut that struck me as bold, sophisticated, fearless. That haircut told me that I was not in her league.
Turns out she hated that haircut. She’d been so horrified by it that she made the stylist do everything he could to mitigate what she called the damage. She was also, like me, trying to raise a child and go to college. We both loved writing and had no idea if we could ever make a living at it. I learned all this later, after we’d started to talk, after we became friends.
Looking back, there was no way either of us could have predicted that we’d somehow form a relationship that would endure decades. We were strangers with nothing but bad hair in common when we met, but forty five years later here we are with a weekly phone appointment that lasts an hour. We cover everything from the squirrel trying to chew its way into her house to our deepest fears about getting older. We laugh. We complain. We talk about our writing. We try to give each other glimpses into the vast swaths of our lives that we live outside our friendship. Sometimes, we revisit the past. This is risky and, sometimes, painful. We did a lot of growing up during those forty-five years and mistakes, big ones, were made. But looking back also fills me with deep gratitude. After each of my worst moments, ones I had forgotten probably because the shame was too much to bear, she found it in herself to give me another chance.
These days, she asks that we celebrate where we are now and where we are headed. Because even though our time together going forward is likely to be shorter than the forty-five years we’ve shared, there are still possibilities to explore. We are not done yet.
We can make new friends at any point in our lives and they can be real, and strong, and true. But we can only make old friends when we are young. This is what my husband meant the other day when he said,
“I'm too old to make old friends.”
I felt a little catch in my throat when he said it. We won’t have another chance to build that kind of history with friends we meet now no matter how much we all enjoy each other, care about each other, and help each other. The history I share with my best friend holds not just the story of our friendship, but a huge part of mine. I can’t tell my story now without her.
As a reader and a writer, I’ve been always drawn to the subject of friendship. My first novel featured a woman who had no close friends but, in the course of the story, formed an intense bond with a fellow loner and stranger. My novel-in-progress hinges on a relationship between two women who meet as antagonists but forge a decades-long bond when they come together for a common purpose. One of my favorite reading experiences was working my way through all twenty Patrick O’Brian novels and watching one of the greatest friendships in fiction unfold between Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin.
When I come across old friends together I am instantly curious. I want to hear the stories. I want to know how they met each other. I want to laugh along with them as they recall “that time when..” I want to peek under the hood to see what makes this relationship tick. Maybe this is why years ago I loved Ellen Goodman’s “I Know Just What You Mean,” and more recently, Gail Caldwell’s “Let’s Take The Long Way Home, a Memoir of Friendship” It is even why I kept plowing my way through “A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara which follows four male friends from their twenties through middle age. “A Little Life” was bloated in a way that often struck me as self-indulgent but it was also deeply compelling. The characters, one of whom spent a lifetime trying and failing to overcome sexual trauma and abuse he experienced as a child, showed the vastness as well as the limits of friendship. The author captured the voluntary nature of friendship in an interview back in 2015 when “A Little Life” came out:
“To me, the thing about friendship that makes it so singular is... It’s a relationship we don’t have to pursue …It’s two people who every day choose to keep it going, and in that way it’s very powerful because it’s one you choose to work on, and you choose to without any agreement; it’s an unspoken bond.”― Hanya Yanagihara
All friendships contain mystery. They come out of the blue, arrive on the backs of circumstance, or necessity, or complete serendipity. Nothing binds friends together, not marriage, blood, or sexual attraction. We are free to leave at any time. Long friendships are proof of not simply of some basic human need but of our capacity for love, acceptance, forgiveness, and growth. The reward: when we look into the face of an old friend we feel seen in a way that no one else can see us.
In these times, who among us hasn’t reached out to our friends, perhaps with new appreciation? Think about your oldest friend(s). Maybe share this post with that friend. Tell me how you met and if you can, tell a story that comes to mind every time you think of him or her or them. How are you keeping up with each other these days of social distancing? In the meantime, here are some links to more musings on friendship and all the forms it takes.
Group Friendship
Love Beyond Sex, Money, and Property; a case for friendship In this article, Lara Fiegel, discusses ten novels that consider friendship among groups of people and pursues an idea raised in Yanagihara’s “A Little Life:” why is a committed friendship considered less adult that marriage?
Big Friendship
What happens when your best friend lives thousands of miles away? Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman started a podcast, Call Your Girlfriend. They talk about the news of the day, the news of their lives, and celebrate women who are doing big things. They talk about the journey of their own friendship in a book that was launched just as the pandemic hit, called “Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close”
If you’d like to get a quick bead on Sow and Friedman’s book, here’s a great interview from NPR. You’ll hear about their growth, the missteps, and the lessons learned the hard way about how Friedman’s assumptions as a white woman hurt her relationship with Sow who is black.
The Importance of Black Women’s Friendships
The freedom to be themselves and to be understood is the theme that runs throughout this short video in which young women explain just why their black women friends are so important to them.
Going The Distance With An Old Friend
This will be the best seven minutes you spend all day. Click play for the story about Mimi and Brownie who met in the South Pacific during World War II and endured for 74 years. Wait for the end and the moment when Mimi looks into the camera with a little tear in her 104-year-old eye and says, “C’est la goddamned vie.”
That’s it for this week. All books mentioned in this issue are available from the Spark Community Recommendations page on Bookshop.org where every sale helps local bookstores and will, eventually, help us to raise money for literacy programs. In fact, if you have friends who have not heard of or are thinking about buying a book, send them over to our page to browse. And let me know what you are reading so we can expand our list! To comment, you may have to register first so to do that, just hit the subscribe button below and follow instructions and you’re good to go.
Gratefully yours,
Betsy (Don’t forget to vote!)
P.S. And now, your moment of Zen…This week’s comes from David Abrams who provided a great little story to go with it:
Here is a recent Zen Moment from a hike we took in Trout Creek Canyon near Helena, Montana last week. My wife Jean, my daughter Kylie, and my six-month-old grandson Ludo went about two miles into this breathtaking wilderness which snakes along the course of a stream bed sunk deep between soaring limestone cliffs. As I wrote on Instagram, "Have you ever been on a hike so beautiful it nearly made you cry?" I have hiked all over this broad country of ours and this is the first walk in the woods which made my nose sting with tears. The best part about this hike is how it took Jean and I by surprise. We've lived in Helena for 10 months (and in Butte, 70 miles to the south, for 11 years), but we had no idea this Shangri-La even existed. How often do we go about our lives, never realizing such stunning beauty waits for us (literally around the corner in this case)?
