Arc of Friendship

In a disorganized box of memoirs were packs of unsorted letters, mostly still in their envelopes. They cover about a decade, late sixties to late seventies. Most of them -- 51 -- were from my friend Trish.  

I sat and read each one as they came out of the box, smoothed out the papers, stapled them to their envelopes, and tucked them into a folder chronologically. Yesterday I finished scanning them and printing them out so I could send the originals to her as part of the legacy to her daughter: a detailed portrait of a college girl turning into a woman.

After I contacted her, she managed to dig out 36 letters from me. I'm waiting to see how they will mesh with hers.

It isn't the story of lifelong friends. We had fewer than 10 intense years, then 20 years of virtual silence.

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We finished up college dorm life together, made a batch of strange sixties-style choices about love & sex, and set up housekeeping in our first apartment together. Then I got fed up with my life and moved away. Wound up at Buck Brook Farm, a communal farm that doubled as a residential center for kids and Trish followed me. We both met our future husbands there and left around the same time to set up housekeeping once again, only separately as newlyweds (or soon-to-be-weds in her case), then we went back to school to pursue degrees in the health professions.

We weren’t alike at all. I was bookish and quiet and socially cautious. She was savvy and gregarious, with a wicked laugh. But during periods apart, we thrived on long letters from each other – letters filled with affection and a comfort with each other that I’m not sure we always felt in person.

When we lived together in Chicago, there were silences. Moodiness I know came from me. Walls grew – not brick walls, just billowy curtains, that muffled our communication nonetheless. Often they’d blow away, then slowly billow back.  At the farm we were absorbed in new relationships. I was definitely into cocooning with my man. Trish was better at communal life.

When we moved away (to Utica and to Rochester), the letters picked up with wonderful fervor, as if we hadn’t gone nearly a year sleep-walking past one another in our close quarters. (To tell the truth, I have no mental record of that year and no memorabilia… curious for the time of my first long-term relationship with a guy, who I would then marry.)

It doesn’t take a genius to pick out the point where Trish's path diverged from mine and the long silence set in. She had kids and I rejected domestic life entirely, ditching my husband and the house with the rental apartments and the omelet pan. I still wanted a correspondent-playmate to share my escapades with Jim, but she became more and more remote.

I am not that sensitive to the total absorption children require. I know this about myself. I get it in theory and I’m very generous with my staff when they need to attend to their kids. But the details don’t interest me. Born without the instinct, I guess. And at least twice, in other circumstances, I felt slighted that someone's focus on their family meant no time for "just friends."

There were early signals that our paths would diverge. We both did a ton of baby-sitting when we were in Chicago. I liked story-telling and playing games with the kids. She was great with the kids but could also tackle the kind of cleaning and cooking chores that always made me run the other way. She could talk to older women about episiotomies and breast feeding, when those subjects struck me as slightly taboo and certainly not anything I should be interested in.

After 20 years we picked up again, on e-mail. She is cautious. Just because Mary and Rhoda had a reunion, it doesn’t mean real life hasn’t turned us into very different women, incompatible and not that interested in “catching up.” For the moment, I am the sentimental one, the philosophical one, pondering what friendship means over the course of a lifetime.

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