Getting Older with Old Friends

It's a bit disconcerting when you refer to someone you met after you graduated from college as an "old friend".

As it turns out, we are now old, although she is older than me.

The list of what I look for in a friend seems to be formed from a constantly evolving set of criteria. When I was six proximity was key. Mary and Josie lived directly behind us; we all went to the same school, we  loved selling lemonade and we liked to ride bikes but most importantly, I could be at their house, unassisted, in about 30 seconds. They were my best friends.

In college geography continued to play an important role in my friend selection, most of my best friends being roommates or those who lived down the hall, but there was more to consider. College friends had to make me laugh, drink beer in dive bars, ride bikes, and understand that there was more to education than what could be learned in a classroom. Commonalities were important; my political science studying self made very few friends in the math department.

When Lisa and I met she was married, lived in an actual house and had a husband who said things like "pick up hotdogs on your way home". It all sounded very grown up and suburban to me. I lived with two other girls in a one bedroom apartment and existed on carry out Chinese food.  Clearly we could never be friends.

It seems I was wrong.

Geography doesn't matter so much anymore. My friends don't live next door but I can still get to them, unassisted, when necessary. I don't spend my evenings in dive bars, at least not as often. My current hang out is the neighborhood coffee shop where I routinely run into some of my favorite new friends. It's tea, rather than lemonade or beer, that occupies the middle part of my life.

Rather than find a good fit for me, I now seem to seek out those who are a good fit for us, for all four of us. People who like my children, and people whose children I like. People who are not afraid to point out to my girls that hanging over a high fence above concrete is not probably a good idea, people that I know will catch them when they fall. People who will ride bikes to the beach with us, and whose children might labor along as mine do, because bike riding is still important, even when you're old.

Just like old friends are important, especially those who evolved with my list and went from being exotic home owners to people who collect Nancy Drew books for my children. Friends who happily spend a cool summer evening at the beach, watching our children play in the sand, celebrating 50 wonderful years of being the kind of person you'd really like to have a drink with, be it lemonade, beer or tea.

Egg in the Mud

"You come here, you haven't been here in so long", and that, when coming from San Francisco is hard to resist. My side of the world was less exciting, and she was promising a spa day in Napa. I bought my ticket.

Where once we had been separated only by a bookcase, we were now over 2,000 miles apart, a thought unimaginable ten years prior. Before email, before Skype, we talked on the phone, constantly, and wrote letters, the wonderful old handwritten kind that now sit in a box in my closet. We met freshman year; I remember quite clearly that she was wearing a lime green suit and white pumps, although she dismisses this, horrified at the idea, and her very comfortable jean and cashmere sweater wearing self seems to negate my memory quite effectively. We were assigned as roommates sophomore year, the girl in the white pumps and the loud girl who wore plaid, which is how she remembers me, an image I cannot dispel. Her second impression, after a thorough scrutiny of my cassette tapes, was that I really liked Billy Joel. She was edgy, she had Flock of Seagulls hair and a taste for new music, crazy stuff like R.E.M. and INXS, I had a bob and John Denver. We were further apart than San Francisco and Chicago.

She spent her nights in the architecture studio, I spent mine at the Wheel. When my late night revelry caused her to oversleep and miss a final I thought we were done. A kind professor, a big heart and my slumbering through the last of Sociology 302 kept us together.

Where she is organized, I am madness. Eventually she learned to sign my name, being the responsible one when we moved from dorm to apartment, and bills had to be paid. As a person who liked to be at the airport two hours before her flight and forced to rely on someone who happily sauntered to the gate as the doors closed, she returned home with a wonderful gift to say thank you for living, only so briefly, on my schedule.

Years later she was at the gate to greet me, of course she was, she had been there for hours. I bet my flight was late. We ate at the garlic restaurant, Johnny Rockets and Hamburger Mary's; we got food poisoning somewhere on the wharf (and lived through it in her Marina neighborhood one bathroom studio apartment), and we rented a car and drove across the Golden Gate Bridge towards Napa Valley.

We stopped in St. Helena, the best small town I have ever seen, and ate sandwiches in the park from a wonderful market, next door to the most amazing kitchen store I could imagine. We were on our way to Calistoga, and the mud baths. Her friends recommended Dr. Wilkinson's Hot Springs, home to the man and the mud. My father was entertained by the entire idea, amused at the idea of the two of us paying money to be immersed in a pile of wet dirt.

Mud smells, and it's hot. It clogs your pores and makes it hard to breathe. With at least a fifty year cushion, we were the youngest people in the room. Every one of us was naked, although it seemed that we were the only ones exhibiting any sense of modesty at all, the rest of the mud sinkers, all seventy plus years of them, wandering from room to room, wearing little but scraps of dried old mud. Forcing yourself, naked, into a pile of warm mud takes youthful stupidity, old determination and strong arms.

My father delighted in this story, "Everyone else was old? And they didn't change the mud? You sat, naked, in used mud?". This had not occurred to me. "Why do you think the mud was so warm? What do you think the old gals did in that mud Allyson? How bad did it smell?". I hung up and called San Francisco, the shriek of horror could be heard across 2,000 miles.

Many years later, when Jack had to call her, on her birthday, to tell her that my father died, she cried, "not today, please not today". But she has shared this day, one of my very favorites, for bringing her into my world, and the worst possible I could imagine, for taking away someone I loved so much. It's become Bill Day, for celebrating and toasting my dad, but it will always be Egg's birthday, a reminder of the passing of time and the value of true friendships.

Twenty six years later we are still friends, best friends.

I wrote this to post on September 25th, but was, of course, late.
Happy birthday my friend!

Making Copies, Keeping Friends

Five copies, all stashed in a box at the back of my closet, waiting to be mailed. They've moved at least six times; that I have found them, yet again, is a true wonder. I made the copies around 15 years, ago, in the supply room at UMB Bank on the Plaza, in Kansas City. Over lunch at my desk, likely steamed vegetable dumplings from Bo Lings, I read an article in Town and Country about five friends who took a hotel barge river cruise through France. Floating down the Burgundy Canal on the Fluer De Lys seemed idyllic, and completely possible; I was unmarried, without children, and working hard to be able to do things like float around in France. And so I made the copies, to send to my friends, thinking that maybe someday, possibly soon, we could take such a wonderful trip.

The articles never made it to the mail, the trip never happened. Our lives grew, jobs became careers; we became wives and mothers, architects and milliners, but not sailors. We live in three different states, the last time I was in the same room with all these women was when I got married. The idea of four days together, without agenda or distraction, is mesmerizing.

Certainly the Canal du Midi is lovely but I'd be content with a few days at the beach, or in a hotel room in Akron, Ohio. This might be the best birthday present in the world; check your mailbox ladies, it's not too late.

All Grown Up Now

The one on the right just graduated from eighth grade. He is taller, at least five inches, than I am, long and lanky and topped with a poof of blond hair. He was, just recently, voted Most Likely to Become President Someday. I have no trouble imaging this at all; he is bright, witty, charming, a snappy dancer and completely comfortable talking to anyone about anything. The first time we met he threw up all over me but has not once done so since, and I thank him for that. Yesterday he introduced my girls to his cool eighth grade friends as "the sisters he never had", as if I didn't love him enough already.

The one on the left no longer fits in those boots. She is tall and blond and just won, with her team, the state lacrosse championship. One night, very long ago, she woke me crying, not feeling well, and in the middle of the night I rocked her and found out just how lovely children could be. Once calm, I promptly put on her diaper, backwards, and, begrudgingly put her back to bed. She has always been the child most likely to roll with the punches, falling down and bouncing back up immediately. She is silly, articulate and fun. She leaves notes for her mom on Facebook that make me cry and has never shied away from adults, a quality I find amazing given her advanced years.

Their mothers are two of my best friends, the first to have children in my gaggle of dears. Two mothers I looked to, and modeled, when faced with this daunting task myself. And now their soon to be quasi adults make me a little less scared of the teenage years that lie in front of us. These two are nice people who love their moms, well done ladies.

Tea Time

The Lisa's are an amazing group, an architect, a singer and a milliner, all creative sorts who impress me still with their genuine talent. The architect restores beautiful old houses, the singer serenades the Detroit area from the musical theatre stage, and the milliner creates art for your head, the most incredible hats you have ever seen.

Several times during the year the milliner and her friends, the hat ladies, display their dazzling head toppers at a tea, held this past Friday at The Peninsula Hotel. Lovely! With our friend Lizzie, the ladies and I, dressed in our tea finest (but sans chapeus), enjoyed the Earl Grey, the cucumber sandwiches, the scones, the sweets and the hats, the absolutely spectacular hats! Of course several had to be tried on, four chocolate smeared hands reaching eagerly toward a long table of milliner art work full of feathers and bows and flowers, none requiring a quick last minute addition of brownie residue. Lisa graciously settled several options on the wee heads, delighting two of her greatest fans. Mary and Kate promptly worked the room from beneath the brim of one ineffable hat after another.


Lisa the architect sends them floor plans for coloring, Lisa the singer encourages their slightly off tune warbling and Lisa the milliner shares her creations without hesitation. Their mother, who can't draw, sings painfully and has no idea how to sew on a button, is forever grateful for the three Lisa's, friends every little girl, and grown up mom, are lucky to have.