TheBanyanTree: Old Friends and Good Friends

[auntie sash]

Reconnecting with my high school friends after 27 years - and refinding the
self I left behind - thoughts of friendship and connection and bonding and
faithfulness.... all that stuff has been swirling around my confused little
brain.

This story captures something.  Something about true friendship and
connection.  I want to be the friend who hands you warm toast and tea and
bundles you up on the couch.  And I want the kinda friends who will show up
- knowing I will be there and not caring that the couch is a worn and the
blanket smells a little bit of campfire.

Thanks for the story.  And for...well.. all the rest.

xoxo
sash

On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 9:45 PM, Monique Colver <monique.colver at gmail.com>wrote:

> Sometimes friends come and sometimes they go. Sometimes, like when your
> husband develops mental illness, they fade away, merging back into the
> blackness of the past as if they’d never been there at all. That was okay
> with me – I was busy anyway, taking care of Stew and myself, trying to keep
> us afloat.
>
> I lied. It wasn’t okay with me. It wasn’t okay at all. But it happens
> anyway, whether I like it or not. It’s not as if people didn’t care, but
> perhaps they just didn’t know what to do or what to say. Perhaps they
> thought it was contagious, like a common cold, and they feared catching it.
> I can see how that can happen. One day they’re happily emailing you and the
> next, you’re reporting that your husband has had a psychotic break, and
> what
> are they supposed to do with that information? Best to do nothing with it
> at
> all, pretend you didn’t hear, pretend you didn’t get the email, and don’t
> write back. Whatever you do, don’t write back. Wait it out.
>
> I had a friend like that. (Several perhaps, but this is about one of them.)
>
> Had being the operative word there.
>
> It’s not that I held that against her. Why would I? Everyone has their own
> stuff to deal with. Everyone has their own . . . je ne sais quoi. (I’m
> going
> with the literal translation here.)
>
> I just like sprinkling my prose with French phrases. It makes me sound
> smart, don’t you agree?
>
> I had a friend like that, and after Stew moved away, coincidentally back to
> the town she lived in, though she’d never met him and never would, she
> tentatively began contacting me again. Maybe she’d just been busy with her
> own stuff. I emailed back, and she kept saying that when I came down we’d
> have to get together.
>
> Of course I’d get down there – I had to go see my friend Stew some time,
> didn’t I?
>
> But it didn’t work out until the last time I went down to see Stew. The
> cancer was in its last stages, and there was no question that I’d be there.
> Stew’s mom picked me up at the airport, and we went to their home, and I
> saw
> him there, my Stew, so weak and yet as if lit from within, the sort of look
> that those close to death can get. Later, after it got dark, I left to
> check
> into my hotel. I went out and got into Stew’s SUV, which I was to use while
> in town, and I started crying. And the rain started pouring down.
>
> And I had no one. I’d had to wait until I left the house to cry. I couldn’t
> do that there, in front of him, that wouldn’t help him at all, would it?
> His
> parents had enough to deal with without me weeping. And I no longer knew
> anyone in this town, no one except my friend who’d said we must get
> together, and so I called her.
>
> I just needed someone’s company. My husband was far away at our home, I was
> on my phone.
>
> My friend tut tutted, you know what I mean, those sounds people make when
> they think they’re being reassuring but they’re really not, and said for me
> to give her a call later in the week so we could have lunch.
>
> Lunch? At that moment, all I wanted was for someone to let me lay on their
> couch and cover me with a blanket so I could sleep, and not be alone in a
> dingy hotel room. I did not want to be alone. Who could sleep on a night
> like this?
>
> The rain kept coming down.
>
> My friend was at home, she said, just having a quiet evening, but to please
> give her a call in a few days and we’d have lunch. She lived less than ten
> minutes away.
>
> I drove to my hotel, and it was a dingy place, but it was in my price
> range.
> On the way I called a true friend, and she consoled me as best she could.
> (By on the way I meant that I stopped and made the call while parked, of
> course. Crying and torrential rain are bad enough to drive in, without
> adding in the phone.) And it helped.
>
> The next day I went to Stew’s house, and I didn’t leave it at night, I fell
> asleep on the couch when I was too tired to stay away anymore, and only
> went
> to my hotel during the day to shower and change.
>
> I had no intention of calling my local friend, but she called me a few days
> later, and wanted to have lunch.
>
> So I went, though I would have rather stayed with Stew. His mother
> encouraged me to go. We went to a restaurant I’d often been to way back
> when
> I lived in this town, and it too was dingy, and had moved.
>
> And my friend and I labored to make conversation. Turns out she didn’t
> think
> of me as a friend at all, but as her secretary. I hadn’t been her secretary
> for 20 years, and she still thought of me as that. To my credit, she did
> say
> that I was the only one of her secretaries that she’d stayed in touch with,
> and boy, did that make me feel special. I did find out that she was lonely
> and isolated since her husband’s death, and I found myself unsurprised.
>
> She emailed me once after that, when she saw Stew’s obituary in the local
> paper. I saw no need to respond.
>
> Life is full of lovely fabulous people, and I’m well acquainted with more
> than my fair share of them. In fact, I’m pretty certain that fabulous
> people
> are just attracted to me, so many of them do I know. I bet it’s that way
> for
> you too, if you thought about it. So it’s okay to let the old relationships
> that no longer work slip away, back into the darkness. There’s always
> something better waiting to take its place.
>
> At least that’s my experience.
>
> --
> Monique Colver
>



-- 
----------------------------
An Ode to Spring:
 Me: "Wow!  It's sunny!"
    Boy child: "About damn time."