My Friend Joan

 We have been friends since we were 10 years old.  She moved to our neighborhood and school at that time. We instantly clicked.  We were both full of high spirits: pranks, silliness and good fun.  Her family was wealthy and mine was not.  That didn't matter so much back then since obvious markers for wealth were not considered tasteful.

At one point when we were  teenagers, Joan's mother won a red Mustang convertible in a raffle, We would drive to the beach in that convertible, attracting much attention. Joan had long blond hair.  I had long dark hair.

 We went to high school and college together.  She met her future husband at a "mixer" at a neighboring college.  I snuck her into our dorm when she missed curfew.  The alarm blared and we ran off.  At one point when we were upper class women,  she "adopted" a baby chicken from the psych lab and kept it in our suite.  It grew to be a rooster and cock a doodle doed  Students would say, did I hear a rooster?  She was found out and the rooster was gone.

Ultimately, after graduate school, Joan married (one week after me) and moved to her husband's state.  We stayed in touch over the years, often going to a yearly "reunion" that several of our old college friends organized.

She and her husband had four natural children and two adopted children.  The adopted children were older when adopted and traumatized by their early experiences, living with an addicted mother and eating out of garbage cans. It was a struggle.

Joan's husband was a lawyer in solo practice.  She was a homemaker and periodic substitute teacher.  They lived modestly.  Joan eschewed her glamorous mother's diamonds and expensive clothes.

At age 54, Joan's husband literally dropped dead.  She went into crisis mode,  Her youngest child was still in high school.  They managed.  Joan's mother gave her $10, 000 to help her through those early months as a widow. She inherited some money from her husband's maiden aunt and then her  older brother who had a stroke while on a gym treadmill.  She sat down every day for months and tackled bills and other paperwork.

Joan never kept up with technology.  Several of my old college friends are like that with iPhones, computers etc,  So we call and write.

Joan's last letter was a litany of catastrophes but she was not self-pitying. Her married son's only car broke down on a busy highway.  She had to get him while tractor trailers whizzed by.  She now is lending him her car or driving him and his wife to their jobs when she needs to use her car.  This son holds a  basically minimum wage job and has no financial resources. 

Then her implant on her front tooth fell out the same day she lost her wallet.

She just said, I'll tackle one thing at a time.  That's what she did when her husband died.

My friend Bev

 We met the first week of graduate school.  We were both working as dormitory supervisors while we took graduate classes.  She was 25, two ears older than I and had already been married and divorced.  She had traveled throughout Europe the previous summer and had slides to impress the undergraduates. I considered her very urbane and sophisticated.  She was one of the smartest people I've ever met.

Bev met someone that first year of graduate school, our age but still an undergraduate since he had been in the Navy.  He wanted to go to medical school. He got in, they married and she left graduate school to work as a teacher and support him.  He hated children but somehow they had three. Two girls and  then a boy who ended up in and out of jail.  But I get ahead of myself.

Bev's husband went on to become a gynecologist.  She said, how bizarre.  He hates women.  

We stayed in touch periodically. Bev was part of a group of four friends from graduate school days.

Bev visited us once and bragged about the enormous home they had built in her husband's home state.  He had joined a multi-physician practice.  It was unlike her to gloat and rather premature.  Her husband soon had an affair with one of the physicians in his practice and divorced Bev.

Bev didn't seem to get a good settlement.  Her husband had to pay for her to finish the graduate degree she started years earlier. That seemed to be it. She somehow lost the house.  Fortunately she was an only child and received a good inheritance.

She moved to Alabama (I'm not sure why) and bought a small horse farm in a rural area.  She always rode, did dressage and taught it when she was married.

All of us "girls" would still get together almost every year, usually at one friend's beach condo on the Outer Banks of NC

Then....Surprise!!  Bev met a man on line, much older and a "writer".  They married quickly. She took him to my husband's 60th birthday party.  He was dressed in a black Zorro cowboy outfit.  After the party, several people, male and female told me he tried to molest them.  Almost worse, he told them about his sex life with Bev :" She has the body of a 25 year old and all parts work"

That she had sunk so low,  

Fortunately, Zorro-husband  wanted her to sell the farm, she wouldn't and they divorced.

Time passed.

Then Bev said, I'd love you all to come to my farm this year.  She called it Hobby Horse Farm and had that logo on her Christmas cards.

 We went.  Flew down and rented a car.  Drove through rural Alabama on an ancient road that needed repairs. Past Churches, cheaply built and sad looking.  Past tattoo parlors. Past porn viewing places.  Past liquor stores with fading signs.  Then we found it.  A rutted road that led through underbrush.  In the middle of no where. 

Hobby Horse Farm.

She greeted us warmly but it was obvious she had done a quick clean up.  Everything was unbelievably shabby and cheap.  She had  just had a fight with the jail bird son asking him to take his heavy metal instruments out of the living room.  Seems he moved in and took over.  No one else in his small family wanted anything to do with him. 

We stayed for dinner. I forget what we ate.  Bev was nervous.  Dinner was not her typical elegant New England aristocrat event.  Jail bird son was working but might come home early.  Obvious he was on drugs. He had a low level job watching security cameras in a building.

Oh yes, there was a white pit bull wandering around the house. One friend was so anxious about it that Bev finally crated it.

When we left everything was pitch dark.  There was a feeling of Get Out!!!  We backed out of the rutted driveway, through underbrush hitting the wind  shield,   Back to our safe motel.

I don't think I ever saw Bev again.

How friends ended up

 There comes a point in life when there is more behind us than ahead of us. All of us exist in a bubble of sorts, surrounded by people similar to us.  Sometimes not everything is apparent. 

I grew up in a normal upper middle class suburb outside New York City.  My father, a strict and serious man, very routinized, took the LIRR  7:09 train in to work every day.  My mother was a homemaker, very religious and rather anxious.  My parents were Irish Catholic Republicans.  

Our neighbors were Ivy League Democrats.  One was an oral surgeon,  but a bit of an outlier since he was Jewish.  Another was a banker, a Dartmouth graduate. His wife was a member of DAR.  He turned out to be a pedophile.  Another was a nuclear physicist.  Another was a lawyer.  Another was a Harvard Graduate who worked for Standard and Poors.  In those days, financial differences were not as obvious.  We had less money and my father was frugal.  We managed to fit in.  My father was well spoken, grammatically correct, rather proper with old fashioned manners and worked in advertising for a large company.  He was socially acceptable.

The public schools in our affluent town  were excellent,  Of course, I went to an overcrowded Catholic grade school staffed by uneducated Catholic nuns shipped over from Ireland.  Baby boom solution.  Catholic high school was only marginally better.  Catholic college better still but at that point I had stopped being intellectually curious and focused on  social life.  Then came graduate school where I met my husband.  We married and settled far from our parents, visiting  them once or twice a year.  My two younger sisters married and lived within 10 miles of our parents home.  My husband's siblings did the same thing.  We were rather nuclear, raising our children without the requisite family holiday gatherings. Sometimes I missed them, but it was mostly the idea of the idealized Happy Family that I missed..

The old neighborhood had cracks.  The oral surgeon had an affair with his dental hygienist and his wife attempted suicide.  The Dartmouth banker was arrested for molesting neighborhood children. The nuclear physicist  divorced his wife who became an alcoholic.  The childless and lonely jeweler next door married a gold digger who had him sign over the house to her before their marriage.  then she locked him out.  He became essentially homeless.  Several years later when I was 14 or so, I was walking down he street with my 16 year old boyfriend and a car drove by us and stopped.  What did we know about the jeweler's house and situation?  We told him and asked him why he wanted to know,  Because she did they same thing to me, said he.  

So in my next posts I will look back, discuss friends, middle class, well educated, from solid families...and what happened to them.

Getting clarity moving forward

 The pandemic has certain benefits for older people like us.  Without the frenzy of dinners out with friends and various events, it becomes clear what and who is important..  

Now so much has ben stripped away and values, attitudes and reality itself is clearer now.  I have dropped three "friends".  One, a long term friend imperiously ignored health regulations early in the pandemic.  Sneered at them. Actually felt sorry for herself since St. Patrick's Day just wasn't the same.  All about her.  It always was all about her.  This behavior put her narcissism in bold relief.

Another, an acquaintance whose husband had a serious case of MS that defied any treatment, had to care for him, with aides for many years.  When we were up north, we would visit them, bring over lunch.  Chat a bit. From Florida, after she was widowed, I'd call periodically to see how she was doing.  In May, while the pandemic was spreading she crossed a county border to go to a hairdresser who was open.  Said her hair was orange.  I wanted to say, if your hair is orange, you need a new hairdresser.  We argued about it, she became very angry.  I haven't called her since and, tellingly, she has not called me.  

The third I feel bad about since she is older and isolated since she  had a fall several years ago.  We were gardening friends. would occasionally go out to lunch.  I'd stop off once a summer when I was back up north. Bring flowers, sometimes food.  Her divorced son moved in with her several years ago.  Recently she called, left a message, she was lonely, couldn't get out etc.  I called her back and we had a nice conversation until she started having delusional and hateful stories about our previous president and the current presidential candidate.  Her statements were racist, derogatory, venal. I asked her what right wing extremist radio she was listening to and that I couldn't disagree more.  Said, I have to go now.

Although sad, these relationships were not true friendships, just convenient acquaintances to chat with  about similar interests. Time is precious.  As my father used to say, time is running out.