Old Friends

Without wanting to misquote Simon or Garfunkel, there really is something to that old friends idea. Something different from, not better or worse than, new friends.
Like everybody, I’ve pretty much seen nobody in the past four months. I have seen lots of people in those nifty little Hollywood Squares-style cages. But I have not hugged or touched another human in so long I’m not sure I remember how.
Yet I have no doubt that my friends are there, will be there, as shall I. Leeds friends, London friends, colleagues from a job I did until this spring. I shall be there for them.
Old friends: University friends, Paris friends, Washington friends. I’ve relied on them more in the past 16 weeks possibly even than in the preceding three years. Example: A group of three of us who met when Clinton was president (as opposed to when Clinton should be the president). Our teeth have lengthened, our priorities shifted, our responsibilities increased.
And yet we set up a whatsapp group to chat about whatever. One member is Annette Bening, another Cybil Shephard and I am Diane Keaton. It is silly, it is not age-appropriate but it works for us when we cannot travel to each other’s homes. It harkens back to a time when we were in our 30s, light on responsibilities and rich in dreams, ideals and plans. The tech of today brings back the aspirations of then. And it reminds us that while our waists might be a touch thicker, there is nothing thin about the love we have for each other. A college friend in Philadelphia is coping with empty nest syndrome mingled with lockdown unease and the sense of a country that has lost its bearings in in too many ways to count. And the simple exchange of emails and ideas about writing and unadorned stories remind me of her cheery face. I don’t need to hear her voice to be transported back to Connecticut in the pre-Internet age when the notion of having children themselves in college seemed as remote as the notion of bringing several people into one living room to chat via a little box. Youth, it seems, can and does pay short visits to those of us whose grey hairs vastly outnumber the brown ones.
My newer friends are wonderful and I love them all, make no mistake. As we thread together the stories of the pre each-other decades we aim to respect a narrative pattern. We try to avoid too much darning of the boring, the embarrassing, the regretted, the missed. But old friends hold up a Linus blanket of the shared, the unspoken “did I really date that jerk?” moments. The blanket pattern is a patchwork of the early victories and roads taken that would better have been ignored. I see in them the women who have soared and left handicaps behind, the girls who danced to the B-52s and ate pizza with pineapple on top – and survived (the pizzas not the music). I see in these adult women the friends who stayed with me until I thought I’d cried more tears than a 110-pound woman could possibly produce. And they remained through the encore.
I look forward to when I can see my new friends in person, in 3-D, not memes on this little laptop. Lest I be disappointed I try not to imagine flying to Paris or Washington to hug the BFFs who know me almost as well as I know myself. Who knows when such travel will again become affordable, practical, tenable, even?
You’re all in my heart, and maybe we do not need to see each other. Much as we’d like to.
Here’s to you, all! Live from Leeds with love and fondness and hopes you too have added to your list new friends who will one day become old ones.