Wednesday, October 10, 2007

This is how my friends and I maintain our relationships:

Jodi comes into the library (where I work) to pick up her kids. Our conversation takes place in the foyer as her daughter is sulking and griping, "C'mon, you said we had to leave right away." Once we talked for 20 minutes standing outside the grocery store door, both of us heading (in opposite directions) for our cars.


Christi and I cross paths at the nursing home, where I am finishing up delivering library books to the residents and she is arriving to visit her mother. We shout our conversation toward each other as we each continue hurrying in different directions.


Carolyn comes into the library between clients and stops by the desk to see if I'm there. We carry on a quick conversation, hug included, before I have to return to the desk and help people, and she has to go to her next client.


Carol and I see each other at the school or scooting out of the post office or at the coffee house, where she and her husband have stopped off for a working break, usually with important people, who are often from another country. She talks rapidly and excitedly at me for a few minutes, throwing in ridiculous compliments before her husband's eyes drag her back to business.

Brenda ("the other Brenda") and I see each other when she comes in the library or when I stop in at the gift shop where she works, now lately we've been seeing each other at church, but church is such a social place, there's barely a chance for a close conversation.


Always, we are SO glad to see each other, always we say we wish we could actually get together.
Sadly I have already tried. I invited one of them to stop by my house in the mornings after we dropped our kids off at school - "just a half hour, coffee or tea." But she was too busy. It made me feel lousy. I tried to get a group to go to the movies with me, in the end there were just 2 of us. At least there were two of us.


Carolyn is better at it. She just grabs me in the moment and says, "Let's go!" And often I have found I can. She manages to catch me when there is nothing really required of me. Oh, I could stay home and clean the house, but I've learned in my "old" age that the house will wait, friends are rare, and an afternoon poking around in an antique shop, then going to a Chinese restaurant for lunch together is far more satisfying and memorable than a tidy living room that stays tidy for approximately 23 hours, if that.

I wish my friendships were like those of women friends on TV shows. Women characters who in spite of having jobs, husbands and kids, manage to meet friends for lunch on a daily basis, wear fabulous clothes, see their friends again in the evening at cocktail parties, and who are so close they even argue with each other. My friends and I have never managed to develop relationships so close and so strong that we could actually risk arguing with each other. Obviously, these TV characters are not real people, they are fictional, but I'll bet that there are many, many women in America who know these TV characters better than and feel closer to them than they do their own real women friends.

Hmmm...reading this over it occurs to me, maybe they just don't like me. hmmmm

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