My New Old Friend

Los Angeles, California

Sometimes good things happen at a time of bad things happening. Six years ago, something very bad happened in my life. And simultaneously, something very good happened to me. It was the gift of a new friendship. As anyone might gleen from many years of blogposts, my friends are important to me. In fact, I've been told that I talk more about the friends in my life than I talk about myself. Joel says by the time he began to know me a little, he knew a lot about my friends.

I had a very bad year when I lost everyone who was closest to me. And then, a friend I had counted on stepped back, and back and back, until she became invisible. I never learned why this happened, and continued to reach out to her. I reach out to her still, on her birthday and at the holidays, despite the lack of reponse. I wish good things for her. She had meant a lot to me, and I would not want to minimize that. The truth is that during a lifetime friends may come and go. Sometimes you are glad to see them go as the friendship has run its course. With others, you might find the only thing you still have in common is the friendship. That can be ok or it can be not enough to sustain. In this case, it was hard to lose the connection to her, but I simply had to accept it.

At the end of that sad year, another woman came into my life. We had known each other in a professional capacity for several decades, and had always liked each other. Without the true friendship and support she offered me when I was at my lowest... I honestly don't know how I would have gotten through it all. She left her house and her husband late one night when I was despairing, to sit with me and listen to me. And I will always, always be in grateful debt for that, and her other acts of profound kindness.

But, this post isn't about Lynnette. It's about Russell. Russell is the brother of one of my family-but-in-a-good-way friends, Karen. I have known Russell almost as long as I have known Karen, which is for many decades. But my friend, Karen, lives out of state so I don't see her as often as I would like. And Russell lives in London, so I never see him. We had emailed early this year as he was going to be in Los Angeles and we made a plan to see each other. That plan was canceled the day before his flight to Los Angeles on March 19th. We continued to email, and our correspondence has continued through all these months.

The way we have chosen or evolved to communicate with each other through this time is as individual as our fingerprints. Only twice have I seen friends during this long period of isolation. But Lynnette and I speak almost daily. I connect by phone with other friends about once a week, and these are long conversations. A few friends who I was in weeklyish contact with, now text with me more frequently. I could go on and on, but the point is that patterns have established themselves. And within one of  these patterns are found the long emails which Russell and I exchange.

Russell and I seem to agree about so many things that I recently wrote to him that only one of us really needs to be here. I am isolated from friends and Joel. Russell's husband has been out of the country for months. And so, our emails have become a touchstone for us both, and have brought me joy and some laugh-out-loud moments (which these days are as good as gold). I wrote to him Saturday and woke up yesterday morning to an email in my AOL inbox, which I enjoyed along with my morning tea in my October pumpkin mug. Not a bad way to start the day.

The pandemic, the politics, the lack of physical contact and disappearance of all of the activities in life that I have come to love -- I could go on and on about what is making me so plain damn ANGRY. You can read it in my recent posts. You can read it in my future posts. Even with my friends, who I truly value, I can find myself pissed off (I write to Russell that I am "American-pissed" to differentiate from Brit-pissed which means inebriated). I offload my anger into my blog and have some relief through that venting, but then I recognize what that is all about. I am just ANGRY and that anger attaches itself to things I have read, or heard, or remember. And I sometimes react to things that my friends have said to me. Which is crazy because they're stressed too and I should understand that. In better times, I am the person who believes that everyone has a right to feel what they feel. So why are these comments or opinions throwing me into this ragespin? One of the tools in my toolbox is for understanding and having compassion for what is different from me. All of the differences: Political, ethnic, religious. So, why is this so hard for me right now during this pandemic time?

Russell is also angry, but what makes me laugh out loud about this is his declaration that people can just fuck right off. Or, as we now both write: FRO. When he first wrote this in his email, I responded that I like that. Americans are so economical, I wrote. We just say it in two words. And I like the urgency. Don't just fuck off. But fuck right off. Like now! Hey, he's on the other side of the pond, yet I tell him that he is clearly American-pissed. So maybe there is an underlying epidemic, during this pandemic, which is plain and simple railing, shaking-your-fist at the sky RAGE. But at times I do wonder if it is just me feeling this unwelcome anger.

I don't have this anger issue with Russell. We debate a bit about American politics. I know so little of British politics that I can't weigh in on that. We dish about food, travel, misbehaving children and parents, friends who disappoint us, and giraffes. He just wrote to me about a giraffe, and I decided to throw that in just for the fun of it.

We sent each other a list of the things we hate. Mine was long. We agreed on our love of staying in luxury hotels and traveling business class on planes. I wrote him that: I get a benefit from applying the proceeds of my frugality to pay for a luxury. He wrote back that he was keeping my sentence. Russell skips daily coffee from Starbuck's because of the annual cost tabulated. I calculate monthly charges for apps, cable tiers, and upgrading my phone, by what it will cost me over ten years. If I'm willing to spend that decade amount, I'm in.

When I was young, we spent summers with my mom's cousins in Reno, and my dad's cousins who lived in the boonies in northern California in a place called Forestville. I loved my fun cousins and all there was to do in Reno. Forestville and those cousins offered up nothing. I was so miserable there where it was dusty and there was no real city with anything to do. I didn't have the language at the time, but I now realize that we had nothing in common with those cousins who were soundly provincial. When my parents would tell them that we were going into San Francisco for the day, they would reply: What for? Thankfully, they must have finally gotten too provincial for my parents, as we stopped staying with them, although we continued to travel to Reno and to San Francisco many summers where we would often shop for our back-to-school clothes at the stores on Union Square.

By the time I was a teenager, we were staying in some pretty nice hotels and resorts. My mom would say that we stayed for free in Reno, so she applied those savings to lush resorts where we vacationed in the Caribbean, or the fine hotels where we stayed in Athens, Amsterdam, and London. I took Mom's cost-averaging rationale with me into adulthood, along with my own philosophy that the only two things worth going into debt over were education and travel. My parents had paid for college, so I had no education expenses. What Tom and I spent at our weekly stay at the Kona Village Resort each October could have afforded us two months at Best Westerns. But, uh-uh. No.

A few years ago I traveled to another city with some friends to see the Dodgers play  a team at that city's home stadium. You learn a lot about friends and family when you travel with them, and usually that is good stuff. This time, not so much. I was surprised by one of the women who had many times previously traveled to and spent time with me in Carmel, where I rented a house for the month of January for about a decade. On this trip she balked at the cost of the mid-range boutique hotel we had booked, and on the second day, directed us to eat breakfast at an inexpensive cafeteria-style restaurant which was part of a pedestrian chain. I went along without complaint. There was a horrific heatwave that weekend, so after the game I suggested we grab a ride back to the hotel from the stadium. After a brief discussion, she threw up a definitive roadblock of an excuse for not wanting to do that. As we walked for over a mile, dripping with perspiration, I realized she was not willing to pay her third of the ride, nor let us pay for her share. That was the proverbial three-strikes straw. I cannot travel with people like that. How much more money did she spend by staying one night in a boutique hotel close to the stadium, instead of a Quality Inn on the outskirts of town? Maybe $100 or at tops $150? What would it have cost her to eat breakfast in the much-nicer hotel dining room, and to split the cost of a mile-long lyft ride? Maybe $25? I always wonder with people like that, where is that $125 now that was saved? Did it change her life? And I understand that paying the extra amount would make a huge difference in the lives of many people. But I knew enough about her to know that this was about financial anorexia, and at the expense of fellow travelers. I had never noticed this about her during her many visits to Carmel, where, like those family trips we took to Reno, she stayed for free. But I probably should have.

So, Russell and I are both checked out on travel and could probably travel well together. We share a desire to do the QM2 crossing some day. And we are discovering a twinship in some areas that I'm not sure we were aware of back in the days when we first met. We both have a memory/date thing though it manifests differently in each of us. And it has been comforting to have this email dialog going through this difficult time. It is one of the good things that have come out of this very bad time.

It's hard to be in month seven of this. Hell, it was hard to be in month one through six. And I am not going through this swimmingly. Read above regarding ANGER/RAGE. But when I try very hard, I can focus on what joy has come my way through new friends; the important reconnections with old friends, and the constancy of Lynnette and Joel, and my friend, Larry who texts me every evening without fail. I have a fervent hope that we all survive the remaining time until we have freedom to be together again. Then I can let my anger abate, stop the circles of rumination, and start catching up on all the hugs, and in-person conversations with friends, which I have missed so much. Lynnette will come visit. Joel and I will dance again. All that and more. I cannot wait. Thank you for reading my blog.