Gone Away

My mom always told me, “You will be able to count the true friends you have in your life on one hand.”

I’ve thought about this a lot over the years and I’m still not sure exactly how to interpret it. Is it a depressing commentary on how few people will genuinely be your friends? Or, is it a beautiful statement about the meaning of friendship and the depth of emotion, loyalty, and attachment that comes along with it? Either way, I’ve found it (along with most things my mom ever told me) to be pretty true.

I say you can count your true friends on both hands instead of one (I’m more of an idealistic dreamer than my practical, realist mom), but the basic theory is the same. Acquaintances come and go, and some “friends” are really something more like buddies – people who hang out with you for a certain period and then fade away. The point is, the true friends, the people you really love and that love you back, the ones who are there for you through thick and thin, those people with whom you just keep getting closer no matter the time or distance, are few and far between.

I have a handful (maybe two handfuls) of those friends and I am extremely thankful for them. Unfortunately, none of them live where I live, which doesn’t mean much except that I miss them and don’t get to see them as often as I’d like. I’m jealous of people who have close friends in close proximity. One of the great things about true friends is how you can go weeks, months, even years without seeing them and, then, when you do, you start right back in like you haven’t missed a beat. Still, it would be nice to be able to spontaneously meet after work for a drink or get together for lunch or have them just a hop, skip, and a jump away if you needed emergency dressing room advice.

I wasn’t always true-friendless in Seattle. In fact, some of my closest friends lived here before moving away. The impending departure of good friends has gotten me thinking about my string of former Seattleite friends and the trend of them leaving and me staying. Interestingly, these friends seem to correspond to each distinct period of my life.

At this point, I’ve been living in Seattle for almost half my life. It is my home. It’s where I became the adult person I am today. When that journey began nearly twenty years ago, my best childhood friend, Marla was living in Seattle as well. (Marla and I met on the bus to a volleyball away-game in 7^th grade. I was still pretty new in town, having just moved in 6^th grade, and was settled into a seat all by myself. Marla came along, scanning the rows for a place to sit. She looked at the empty spot beside me a bit cautiously and asked, “Can I sit there?” “Sure,” I shrugged, and by the end of that trip, we were best friends. Once we started talking, we never really stopped.)

Me and Marla - 1989

(You can tell we're good friends because we're happy here despite the dreadful blue, shiny unitards that were our freshman year dance team uniforms.)

After graduating from Oregon State University, we both moved to Seattle, and while we lived in different neighborhoods and were doing different things – me working and Marla attending graduate school – we saw each other quite a bit. Marla was the lone person who knew me, in a brand new, big huge sea of people. I always felt like a big city girl trapped in a small town growing up, so I was more than ready to immerse myself in urban life, but it was nice having somebody from my hometown just beyond the ship canal bridge. Marla helped me look for my first apartment – and understood how hilarious it was when the apartment manager tried to romanticize a tiny first floor unit by suggesting the tree outside the window made it “just like living in the country.” It makes me laugh now to think of what small town girls we were – bumbling along in the city, meeting new people and trying to figure out the oddities of urban life. We found a new pizza place (nothing could replace our hometown Pizza Deli of course, but we did our best) and discussed strange people like the guy with the implanted vampire fangs, who routinely stared at Marla on the bus. One evening, at what was probably the height of our small town girl naiveté, we stopped by the Safeway on Broadway to pick up some drinks to accompany our take-out Thai food. We were standing in the check-out line, chatting away, completely oblivious to the fact that a pair of police officers were pepper-spraying some hoodlum into submission on the floor not ten feet away from us. We both starting coughing – subtly at first, and then a little harder. We looked at each other in confusion as our eyes began watering and we noticed people clearing out.

“Hmmm . . . why are we the only ones still standing at the register?”

“Oh look, the police have that man down on the floor! He’s struggling . . . Huh. Weird.”

We finally figured it out – but I think it took the checker yelling something very obvious like “PEPPER SPRAY!” at the top of his lungs at us. Ah, city life! Well, Marla finished graduate school in no time and moved to the Portland area for a great job in her field and to be closer to her then-fiancé, soon-to-be husband Steve.   

(Marla and I recently took a trip together to celebrate a big birthday year. (Yes, we’re both 30! It’s hard to believe, isn’t it!?) We spent eight glorious days exploring Boston and Cape Cod – doing whatever we wanted and talking the entire time. It was the most time we had spent together since high school and it felt exactly the same – no beats missed.)

Me and Marla in Nantucket - May 2012

(We're happy here both because we're really good friends and because we're having a fabulous time in Nantucket.)

So suddenly, Marla was gone. Fortunately for me, by the time Marla moved away, Amy (who I met when we were both summer interns) finished college and moved to Seattle. Amy is hands-down one of the most fun people I’ve ever met. She’s smart, and hilarious, and refreshingly blunt, and rolls with the punches with such grace and efficiency, it never ceases to astonish me. Being with her is a guaranteed great time. It doesn’t matter if we’re sitting in our sweats watching TV, or having martinis for lunch, or getting lost in the middle of the night in the Eastern Washington desert, or carrying a pitch-covered Christmas tree twelve blocks from a tree lot to a tiny apartment. And so, with Amy by my side, my fun, and crazy, and sometimes painful, but never lonely, 20s ensued. For a brief period, she moved to California where her then-boyfriend, eventually-to-be husband Larry was still finishing college. It wasn’t too long before they both returned to Seattle and Amy moved into an apartment right around the corner from mine. Most Monday nights, we had dinner and watched TV at Amy’s apartment, and, once a week, we did our laundry over beers at the now defunct Sit & Spin. Much analysis of our budding careers and love (or lack-thereof) lives occurred over those laundry nights.

Amy and I had as much fun as a couple of 20-somethings should – going out and having fun, and staying in and bemoaning that our lives were not yet what we hoped they would be. It was perfect . . . until Larry got into medical school in Chicago and suddenly, Amy was gone. Amy and Larry are settled in Yakima now, which is certainly closer to Seattle than Chicago, but with kids and busy lives, we don’t see each other nearly enough.

After Amy left Seattle, it took quite a while for my next really good, true friend to come along. I was busy with work and graduate school (both of which provided lots of distractions in the way of professional and academic challenges, as well as a number of friends). At some point during all of that, Wil and Grisell moved to Seattle from Miami and Wil began working with my husband, Matt. The relationship began as a professional connection, but quickly turned to friendship. Wil and Grisell made requisite work-related social events much more fun and it wasn’t long before we were doing lots of things together outside of the work realm. We rang in the New Year together, we camped and dug for oysters together, we gathered for dinner parties and Super Bowl parties. We even witnessed Janet Jackson’s famous wardrobe malfunction together! One of our dinner parties devolved into what was most certainly the most drunken badminton game of all time.

Our sons Chester and Roman were born 6 weeks apart during the summer of 2006 and Grisell and I spent that summer and fall taking walks with the babies, conducting research on whether strollers or front-carriers made them cry the least, meeting for coffee with the babies, figuring out how in the world to get them to sleep, and basically propping each other up during those scary and difficult early parenting months. I’ll never forget the first time we laid Roman and Chester down together on a blanket at Green Lake – they turned their little heads toward each other and stared as if to say “Well hello there, I guess we’re going to be friends!” (Miraculously, neither one of them was crying at that moment.)

Me and Grisell - August 2006 - New Moms

We’ve spent six wonderful years sharing parenting milestones– birthday parties, play-dates at parks, trick-or-treating, Easter egg hunting, and treks to the zoo. We’ve gone through Thomas the Train, Buzz Lightyear, Beyblades, and Batman together. Our dinner parties look quite a bit different now – instead of playing falling-down-drunk badminton, our bourbon comes in much more responsible quantities and we’re typically playing tag with the kids in between sips. Our idea of a fantastic evening is walking to the park after one of Wil’s delicious grilled dinners, watching Chester and Roman alternate between racing each other and sweetly holding hands – friends since birth.

Well, you know what they say . . . The only constant is change, or something like that. (I’m not really sure who “they” are, but “they” are infuriatingly right about these sorts of things.) Now Wil and Grisell and Roman and baby brother, Lorenzo are going away too – moving back to Miami to be closer to family. I know we’ll always be friends with them (and now we have a great excuse to visit Florida) – just like I’ll always be friends with Marla and Amy. This friends-going-away business has happened before and I know distance doesn’t really mean much when it comes to true friends, but it does feel like the end of an era – of another phase of my life.

So here I am, true-friendless in Seattle once again. Sometimes I wonder why I always stay while everyone else goes. I wonder if maybe I’ll ever be the one to leave. I’ve certainly had chances and have always chosen to stay. I’ve cited financial or other practical reasons each time, to myself and to others, but deep down I know it’s because I’m really connected to this place.  

I’m left wondering what and who the next phase will bring. Maybe my mom is right – maybe I’ve already been blessed with as many true friends as one can expect to have in life and my one handful is complete. Or maybe there will be more – perhaps the mom of one of Chester’s elementary school classmates? Maybe someone I meet through my own adventures? At any rate, I’m looking forward to it, as well as to plenty of visits to and from Marla and Amy and Wil and Grisell.