On Friendship, Part III: Up from Down

Most of us choose our friends not based on how we are exactly alike, but how we complement one another.  I was always blessed with book smarts and could learn most things that I could study.  However, I had no sense of people.  I took them at face value, believing them all to be similar to me in moral and ethical fiber until they proved differently.  As a teacher, that's been beneficial to me, allowing me to pretty much give all my students an even playing field when they enter my class.  But in life, it led me to a lot of mistakes and heartbreak when I just couldn't discern what people were really up to.  Laura, on the other hand, could read people like a mystic reads an aura.  I was always in awe of it.

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Laura had an unerring sense of people; she could, within a matter of minutes, size up most people's personality and whether they were trustworthy or not.  Now, never once did I hear her pronounce any sort of immediate judgement based on this talent:  I learned to see it in her eyes, because we were so close.  Rarely did she fail in this innate understanding of character; I think I could count them on one hand.  But one of the great regrets of her career and her life was hiring a man she failed in reading, one who, in just one academic year, made me into his little puppet, controlling me utterly and systematically dismantling my mind and spirit. 

It didn't take long for her---and others---to realize how deceptive he was and that he would wreck me.  Laura didn't say that outright.  She was the only person I've ever known who would never, ever give friends relationship advice or tell someone, "You better dump him, girl," because, as she told me, it always comes back to bite you on the ass.  If they break up, they blame you.  If they get back together, you've lost a friend because you've called out the guy's character.  So she didn't say much....but she didn't have to.  I was her best friend and could practically read her mind by that time, as she could mine.  But a lot of other friends and co-workers were VERY willing to try to get me off that fast track to destruction.  I refused to listen to anyone, claiming that most pathetic of girls' excuses:  "They don't know him like I do."  He could and did convince me to break rules our jobs were based on.  I began to favor his opinions over all others.  Any free time I had, he had first dibs on---to go walking or to Ned's or to the lake, to listen to Smokehouse Blues on KMOD or play poker with a group of co-workers.  I was happy to hear my phone late in the evening, when he would call and read me something he'd come across.  Oh, I could write (and have) pages and pages about that story, but all that's important here is that, of course, everyone else was right.  I was right, too---some part of me knew he would go and I'd be broken, but I went along willingly because I was young and, fancying myself a poetic sort, hell-bent on a kind of self-destruction only depressives crave.  I had not one cold iota of what I'd got myself into.

For six months after he left, I went to bed at night saying a fervent prayer that I would die.  Every morning when I woke, I would cry because my prayers failed.  That's my only clear memory of what transpired during that time, though I know I kept working.  But I do know this:  I didn't go anywhere.  I wouldn't go out of my apartment except when I had to, and most of all, I wouldn't hang out with anyone.  I went to Laura's house the night he left, when she was packing to move to a new place herself, right at the end of the academic year.  And that's the last time I set foot in her house for eight months.  I wasn't angry with her; I didn't resent the fact that she was right.  I simply couldn't face her.  We had work conversations (she was my boss, after all), but nothing else.  I didn't eat lunch with her, or with anyone else.   Every system in me just shut down.   I stopped listening to music and started leaving the TV on all the time.  Before, TV was incidental to me; I'd only owned one for a year or so.   And I remember that I tanned---tanned, with this fair skin!---every day that summer, with the baby-oil routine and everything.  It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that I had a nervous breakdown, on my own terms. 

It's perfectly possible that our friendship would have sunk under the weight of my stupidity if not for a kind, well-meaning co-worker who thought he might rescue me from all this.  He'd seen the whole thing happen and thought he might be a replacement for Mr. So-and-So.  There was no way that could happen---but I owe him a most fervent debt, because he gave Laura and me our friendship back.  He would come over and make me go out walking that winter, because we had been friends for a while and he knew that I loved to go on walks.  One February evening, we found ourselves (under his direction) walking near Laura's apartment, and he said we should stop by.  I was very hesitant, but I agreed.  Oh, it was so awkward.  I cry now to think of that moment, how stiff and formal I felt sitting on the edge of her couch, and how much I owe Rob for returning us to one another.  There's no way I can imagine what would have become of either of us if not for that visit.

We didn't really talk about it, not for years.  I was so ashamed, and she was wary.  Slowly, slowly, we began having lunch again, together and with other co-workers.  By the end of that year, when I left the hall manager job for a full-time interim teaching job at NSU, we were back to shopping or hanging out on weekends.  We took the first of many mini-vacations, the only kind we could afford:  Easter weekend in Memphis to revel in the over-the-top tackiness of Graceland and the throbbing blues of Beale Street.  She went with me to South Dakota to see my brother's family, and we visited her mother's grave in Sioux Falls.  Time worked its healing wonders.  The trust that had been shattered was mended, and forged in steel.  Never again would it break. 

Even when I went to work at the University of Texas for a year, still trying to repair my soul and needing to stretch my bounds, we didn't feel a strain, except for only getting to see each other two or three times during that school year.  I remember once when she called me in Austin, scared out of her wits and crying because her father, deep in the throes of Parkinson's, had suffered a fall and been hospitalized.  I remember that call so well, over an hour long, because I felt a tingling in my leg after about 30 minutes, and looking down, I realized that, unable to reach her, I'd been rubbing and patting my leg all that time trying to soothe her.  There were a lot of signs that I didn't need to stay in Texas, but that is the one that seems most directly from God, his voice whispering "Go home, go home, girl."  I didn't waste any time doing so; in May of '93, I came home to no job, very little savings, but my family and my best friend to see me through.

It took until November of that year to find a teaching job---Roland Junior High, another blog entirely for all it gave me.  I could live less than an hour from Tahlequah, so Laura and I could visit each other regularly.  I was only 10 miles outside of Fort Smith, which gave us all kinds of new places to explore.  Laura always loved Christmas lights, and Fiona Hills gave us a whole new gorgeous setting to investigate, inspiring us to make up certificates we called Griswold Awards to leave in the mailboxes of houses we thought were especially well-decorated.  Once in a while, she would make the ultimate sacrifice and travel with my speech team to be a judge.  She was great at the judging, having done a lot of drama in school, but teenagers kind of made her skin crawl.  Yet she supported me in that work, praising me in so many ways that I know she made me a better teacher----for her to lose faith or be disappointed in me would have horrified me.  Together we scoped out Van Buren, Central Mall, the first Best Buy we had ever seen, and that delicious burger place in downtown FS, on Garrison.  We spend a lot of time in the car, and we would have long talks that went everywhere and nowhere, and we were perfectly happy with that.   And somewhere in this time is when we began to have a special Christmas celebration, sometimes with friends, sometimes just us, with a home-cooked meal and Christmas music and several little presents apiece before a bigger present.  She could do that---make what seemed to be pretty paltry into an occasion.   

This was also, no doubt, the time we began not only to realize but also to talk about how lucky we were to have such a good friend, and that most people not only didn't have such a friendship, but didn't even know such a thing existed. 

Within a few years, I was ready to come "home," back to Tahlequah, although in truth, probably wherever she was would have been home by then.  When the time was right, God put his hand at my back and gently pushed me forward to a new job in LG, a new home....and the best and worst of what could come of the deepest of friendship.

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Next week, the conclusion.  

On Friendship, Part II: Joy

Leoser Complex, fall of 1986, was an odd brew of girls and guys; Job Corps still occupied two wings of South Complex, so we had 3 floors of guys, 9 floors of girls, and the handful of male residents that took up a half floor in Wyly, still the College of Optometry in those days.  That meant we had mixed staff, too.  It could not have been more unlikely:  non-traditionals who were just a few years older, like John Ryder and me, little spitfires like Trish McAlpine and Wendy Barlow, younger sort-of-innocents like Anthony Zulch and Julia Harrison.  Hettie Orange, with the biggest laugh ever, and zany Dana Adair.  Later, Jackie Bullard and Tom Cannon, distinctive individuals who seemed destined to be a part of the group.  You could not put together a more mismatched crew of college kids.  But we bonded over two weeks of staff training, a gigantic off-campus party for my birthday in the middle of that, and then the long weekends when we mostly all stayed on campus, doing laundry, studying, watching movies, going to Granny's Attic for our weekend drinking festivity, and sitting up all night having philosophical discussions or playing a game that we literally (embarrassingly) called "Dormbusters."  We were having the best time of our lives, though we had no money and no clue about life.  I still count many of the friends I made those Leoser years---Jackie, Julia, Anthony, John, Lorraine, Steve, Dean, Wally, Tom---among the truest friends, the ones who loved me most completely, out of all the people I've ever known.  But Laura was the glue that bound us all together.

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When Laura had to let the staff member go who wasn't passing, she lost her closest friend on campus.  They remained friends, but Tena had moved back to Tulsa, and Laura wouldn't go that far in her giant cruiseliner car she called Bart to see her.  It was noticeable that she missed her, though she had an entire galaxy of people that orbited around her, a cloud of student and professional staff who admired her and liked to be around her.  I was there, and like most of the students who worked for her, I found myself spending a lot of my spare time in her apartment in the evenings, where she gently reigned from the "Commando" chair, a brown velour number she'd inherited from her sister, and we would pile in the floor on pillows or blankets (the air in there was set on freeze-your-ass almost all year long), or on the also-inherited contemporary "taco couch," which had a tendency to suck your backside into the crevice and never, ever let you go.  I can't count the hours, Pepsi's, cigarettes, or reams of topics consumed, but I know that's where our friendship was sealed.

 

My family was living in South Dakota that year, so I was mostly on my own.  I spent almost all my time on campus.  Soon, Laura and I were going out doing stuff with another friend or two, not always staff.  Previous staff and old friends like Dawn Killian, Sue Casto, and Lorraine McDonnell were older than the people we worked with and more to our mindset.  Then after a while, it didn't matter whether anyone else was coming with us.  We found we ran on the same speed, temperature, temperament, and timetable---symbiosis.  If we went shopping, we got bored with it at the same time:  pretty quickly.  We liked the same kind of movies:  suspense, mystery, chick flicks, breakup stories.  Anyplace over 65 degrees was too hot.  We smoked the same amount---even the same brand.  By the time I finished my Master's, we were so close that I thought of her as a sister.  In fact, she moved up to a professional off-campus position that year, and I took her Hall Manager job and continued to teach part-time for Arts & Letters. 

 

To see it from the outside, we should not have been friends.  I liked to be at the center of things, and she did not.  I was an outside farm girl, always up for a trip to the river or the lake, day or night.  Laura hated outside and bugs.  I drank rivers of alcohol when I was still a student, and she hardly ever took a drink, due to a blackout incident she had at Dakota Days back when she went to USD.  She loved jazz and hated blues, while I absolutely wanted to break out in hives at the sound of jazz.  Blues spoke to my soul.  She hated most meat, and I was a rancher's daughter raised on beef.  I adored poetry (still wrote it back then); poetry mostly induced eye-rolling in Laura.  Conversely, she was notorious for crying at Hallmark commercials, movies, weddings, you name it.  I was, at least publicly, as tearless as the Sahara.  I was messy, and the older Laura became, the more of a neat-freak she became.  My habit of kicking off shoes everywhere drove her crazy, and her father's secret nickname for me was Pigpen, because I always had a pile of stuff scattered around me, wherever I was.  I was in awe when I found her considerable record album collection was alphabetized.  Art Deco, flamingos, and anything from the 40's and 50's spoke to her.  I remember when she bought an old TV remote control simply because it was identical to the one that her family had when she was little.  While I admired her commitment to a style, I didn't get that style---at all.  I came to understand that, like many other things in her life, to be an attempt to reclaim a sense of her lost home. 

 

So different, but so clearly best friends by that summer we changed roles.  After that, we still ate lunch together most every day, had girls' nights when we would go do ceramics or some other crafty things, went to every Mexican restaurant and Luby's we ran across, hit up craft fairs anywhere we could find them, and spent many a cool weekend afternoon doing what we called "junking," going to antique malls in Locust, Springdale, or Muskogee.  We went to several housing conferences, most notably one at OSU, where we went out to Eskimo Joe's with a bunch of other delegates.  Standing on the stairs in the old beer garden there, nursing her White Russian that must have been pretty strong, she looked up, spied the moon, and proclaimed in childlike wonder, "The moon."  Immediately afterward, she seized up, half-shouting, "Oh my God, the roof is gone!!!"  That story, the memory of her expression and voice, still make me laugh, 25 years later.  It made her laugh, too.  And there was no, is no, probably never will be a laugh that was better than hers.  It was real, head thrown back at first---then if she really got tickled, she'd start to laugh so hard she couldn't catch her breath, she'd start to turn purple, and I'd start screaming at her, "Breathe!" which never helped.  I don't know why, but we could make one another laugh for the most ridiculous reasons---even in annoyance.   Somehow, once, we got on a discussion of how underwear should fit.  I felt it should be close-fitting; her philosophy seemed to run toward underwear that only touched at the waist and was loose from there.  This just made no sense to me, and I harped on it off and on over a long period of time.  Finally, one day when we were on our way to shop in Muskogee, I was warming up to get rolling on this again, when without warning, she exclaimed, "Shut up!  You're giving me a tic!"  First I laughed, then she laughed, and I don't even remember how I finished driving into town after that, because we could...not...quit. 

 

No, there didn't seem to be a lot of reasons for us to be friends, but many people could say that about their closest friendships.  What I don't know is whether most people are stupid enough---truly, so much of a jackass---as to try to lose their best friends.  I was.  I did. 

 

 

***Next time:  Up from Down***

On Friendship, Part I: Serendipity

I decided when I started this project that there would come a day for a particular subject, the best and most difficult of subjects for me to write about.  It would be a bitterly cold winter day, with a strong north wind, low clouds, and at least the possibility of snow.  It came so quickly---the months always moving faster, faster---that it nearly takes my breath away to realize it's here.  It is here.  This is just the sort of day she would have loved.

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In the late afternoon of a day that may have been much like today, 29 years ago, I was studying in my dorm room, #336 in Haskell Hall.  I think it was a weekend, but I can't be sure about that.  The building was pretty quiet, and the weekend-evening atmosphere of calm hung in the air.  I had my door open, which was encouraged, to help residents build community;  I just liked having the door open so that I didn't feel stifled, closed up in my room during the marathon reading required of English majors.  The resident assistant for our floor was an older, very intimidating girl named Sally, who lived two doors down from me.  That night, however, the assistant hall manager was on duty, and it was she who passed my door and then stepped back for a minute's conversation on her 10 o'clock rounds. 

 

I don't know what we talked about, or for how long, before she looked over at a bulletin board next to the closet.  Her eyes lit up, and she stepped over to the board.  Among the usual college melange of concert ticket stubs, photos, and keepsakes, there was a postcard of an evening-lit Mount Rushmore superimposed on a brilliantly red and black sunset.  It was an icon of my home-away-from-home, the South Dakota farm where we spent our summers.  To her, it was much more.

 

"Have you been to Mount Rushmore?" Laura asked, smiling----for, as you might have guessed, if you know me at all, it was Laura.

 

"Yeah, lots of times!" I replied excitedly; not many people of my age at that time had traveled the way we did or had much curiosity about other places as I did.  "Have you been there?"

 

"Yeah, I grew up in South Dakota, in Sioux Falls."

 

"Ohhh, so you're East River?"  I laughed.  Dakotans jokingly refer to others according to which side of the Missouri River they live on. 

 

"What do you know about East River!?" she exclaimed.

 

"Well, I'm West River."  Everyone knew that East River was higher class, just a little more sophisticated, a bit more urbane, if there is such a thing in the northern plains.  West River, on the other hand, was scrappier and more hardscrabble, tougher but also more sparsely beautiful.  That good-natured opening gambit was all it took for an immediate bond to form.  We talked as easily as neighbors across that river might.

 

If I'm not imagining things, that was the first time I met Laura, and the first time I saw her cry, just for the homesick happiness of meeting someone who spoke the native slang of her childhood.  I could not have known at that moment how the gearboxes had shifted to click my entire life into motion that winter evening.  I knew only that I had made a new friend, one who loved the same place I loved, one who loved it with the pure adoration of a child. 

 

I did not know then the story of her mother's long, terrible death from Crohn's disease when Laura was barely 19, how her father's hands started shaking the day of the funeral and never stopped, and how he was forced into retirement soon afterward. I didn't know that she was at NSU because her father had then sold the house and told her she could take what would fit in her car, and they were moving to Owasso, where her half-sister lived.  I couldn't have known that a simple postcard evoked all that she had loved and lost, nor that God placed it where and when she needed to see it.  Never could I guess at the blessings that were planned for us from then. 

 

We didn't become inseparable, not right away.  I was a devoted student, and she had a lot of friends she kept up with in addition to work and school.  But I remember hanging out in her room occasionally, sometimes with a crowd of admiring girls in there chit-chatting.  Laura was two and a half years older than I, but she carried herself with a little bit of sphinxish mystery that made her seem even more mature, so the younger residents really took to her.  I remember a couple of sisters from Muskogee who weren't twins but could have been, who Laura took under her wing, teaching them about makeup and clothes.  She didn't gossip or talk smack like some of the other girls, and we learned quickly that she fought for whatever was the "right" thing to do for the residents.  Once Laura befriended you, unless you proved yourself unworthy, you had an ally in your corner no matter what.

 

She proved that the summer after we met, when she got me an RA job in Ross Hall, sight unseen.  The hall manager hired me on her word alone because I was in South Dakota for the summer.  That next year in Ross yielded two other good friends, ones I still keep in touch with and see from time to time.  I have Laura to thank for that and for them.

 

After doing my internship and a semester of grad school living off campus, I had a mini-nervous breakdown about my party lifestyle and decided I needed a change.  Miraculously, literally the very moment that I made that decision, I received an offer to serve as a graduate assistant for that fall of 1986.  It was manna, but not enough to eat and pay rent.  Laura was by that time a permanent full time Hall Manager, and I headed off to see if she knew of any open jobs on campus, although housing was probably out, since RA training would start in two weeks.  She had just lost one of her RAs for the fall because of failing grades.  I had a job before I walked out the door.

 

And a confirmed loner was about to have a family of her own.

 

...To be continued...

 

 

 

 



Do As I Say

I don't know who you are, but I know what you're up to:  you're breaking your New Year's resolution to eat better and lose weight.  You've lasted five days, but darn it, it's Saturday night, and you really need a nice evening out after all the frenzy of the last few weeks: holiday parties, family gatherings, and treat-making for the kids.  No prep and no clean-up at home.  I understand.  It's OK.  If you've lasted this long, you've already beat most of the people who made that resolution to begin with.

I don't usually make resolutions.  Why set myself up for failure?  The only resolution I consciously remember making in the last 20 years was in 2000, when I set out to write an essay a week, similar to what I'm doing here.  I'd have to go back another 10 years, to New Year's 1990, to the only year I really resolved to lose weight.  I say "really" because it was more than just a random wish; I had a plan, one of my own making, one that I would never, ever suggest.

Each day, I allowed myself 1000 calories.  In those days, I didn't eat breakfast---or more honestly, breakfast was a diet soda and a couple of cigarettes before I dashed off to teach my morning classes (this was back when I was a hall manager and adjunct instructor at NSU).  For lunch, I had salad (lettuce, carrots, celery), no dressing, or a little bit of Miracle Whip if I added tuna, which I could actually stand back then.  I would cut up a slice of some kind of diet cheese to top this tasty mess, and I could have 6 saltine crackers.  If I skipped the cheese or Miracle Whip, then I'd have a frozen diet brownie, one of those original Weight Watchers things, I think.  (This was 23 years ago, and many brain cells have died.)  I almost always had lunch with someone. which helped keep me honest.  Dinners I am a little fuzzy on remembering, but I think this is where I first started eating some of the frozen Lean Cuisine dinners.  Yes, I remember that now: there were only a handful I would touch, but spaghetti and lasagna and sweet and sour chicken can get you a long ways.   No matter what, I relentlessly tracked calories and would not go one single calorie over goal.  The kicker for the plan was walking:  I had to walk a minimum of three miles a day, but I often walked a lot more than that.  The inspiration for this project (a man, you might have guessed) and I trekked all over Tahlequah in the evenings; it'd be hard to find a single street that we didn't walk down at some point, or several points.  On even the wettest or coldest days, I'd be at the NSU track, Walkman in my pocket, striding briskly to Don Henley's End of the Innocence album. 

And it worked.  In six weeks, I lost 40 pounds.  I could wear clothing sizes I hadn't worn in years, and styles that I'd never been able to wear.  People noticed, and certain people noticed more.  I remember getting one of the best compliments I'd ever had at that point in my life:  "You're the ONLY girl I've ever met who could resist a McDonald's french fry, even just one."  To a 26-year-old food junkie, that was high praise, especially considering the source---even better than when he told me I'd "be the hottest thing on the dance floor this spring." 

But plateaus arise and springs pass and smooth talkers leave town...and no one of my age, height, and size could live on 1000 calories a day.  It couldn't, can't, be maintained.  Slowly I went back to my old habits, and though it took a few years, all the weight lost came back and brought some friends to the party.  Up until that point, other than migraines, I had been blessedly healthy.  Afterward, everything began to break.  I trace many, many of the problems I've had health-wise back to that episode:  ulcers, GERD, gall bladder attacks, triglycerides, blood pressure, and diabetes came calling in the next 10 years.

If I were truthful, though, I'd need to admit, I always knew about some of those things.  My papa was diabetic; I can remember watching him give himself his insulin shots when I was very little.  Of his four brothers, I think at least one of them was diabetic, but I think it was more.  An uncle and several cousins all had or have it.  Because of the genetic predisposition, I'd always been told to watch out for it and to be tested regularly.  But like most any young fool, I was cavalier about it because I WAS so healthy.  I loved sweets and paid no attention to how much I consumed in balance with the rest of my diet, and it never seemed to cause a problem, except for the number on that dang pesky scale.  None of the things that would come to ravage my body because of my weight seemed more than a single distant cloud on a sunny horizon---until they all swept through, one storm after another, laying waste to that happy good health. 

I've not been resigned in the face of it.  Diagnosed borderline diabetic in 1995, I quit pop cold turkey and didn't have to change anything else, until I had to start taking oral meds in 2003, when Laura was dying.  Told that my triglycerides were so high I'd have pancreatitis if I didn't go very low-fat in my diet, I spent the summer of 2001 experimenting with very low to non-fat cooking----an enterprise I don't advise, but I did bring my numbers down and have kept them very low since.  I gave up smoking and was able to cut back on my blood pressure meds by half.   My A1C blood sugars have been well below the 7.0 that Indian Health wants diabetics to maintain for several years now.  And for three years, I've been concentrating on being healthy as possible in every way: finally finding an exercise I WANT to do every day (water aerobics, which is NOT as easy as many think), training myself to drink water and giving up even diet soda,  looking for ways to get more protein in my diet, and getting a C-PAP machine that gives me better quality of sleep.  None of these changes everything, but everything changes something.  I take whatever steps I can whenever I can.

That's what I wish everyone knew as they set out at the beginning of each new year to "really get in shape" this year.  It's a job not cut from whole cloth; it's pieced together, particularly for those of us who will always have a long road.  If I ran into that 26-year-old, and if she would listen, I think I'd have to tell her, "Don't worry about your weight; think about your health.   Don't go looking at those People 'Half Their Size!' cover stories.  Look in the mirror.  There's YOUR story.  Write it---and don't write it for anyone else.  Your opinion is the one that matters, the one you'll live with for the rest of your life.   Be wise---be well---get started." 

You, too, friends:  Be wise.  Be well.