Friends Go North on Vast Wave of Opportunity and Bliss

Now the truth can be revealed. Why so much crying this past weekend? Well, sometimes one just gets in that mood, and yes, that is often right before one gets one’s period, which is fine. The sloshing of hormones is a beautiful, natural thing! I read once that maybe these more intense feelings are, in fact, one’s true feelings and that’s how I like to think of it.

The Stevie Wonder album I just got, Signed Sealed & Delivered, has on it, besides the song I was looking for, a couple of incredibly lovely songs that I have listened to over and over. One is called “Gotta Have a Song,” which is about the power of music to heal heartbreak.

He sings that his wife used to be in the kitchen cooking for him all day, and he keeps rushing home to see if she might be there, but he knows she’s gone. That’s so sad!

But the overshadowing melancholy thing was the possible departure of our very best in-person buddies, David and Lisa, who were across town in their apartment mulling over a change of venue to Seattle, where David had been offered an excellent career opportunity.

David called this morning and said that after much soul-searching on both of their parts, they have decided to move to Seattle, and he has called his new employer to say he will take the job. I think that was absolutely the right decision (though I would also have thought it was the absolute right decision if they’d concluded they preferred to stay here; in other words, there was no way they could go wrong), and now that the decision has been made, I am excited for them.

Not to worry; Lisa’s current and also excellent job can be packed up and shipped to Seattle, too.

My dear friend Elea and her family are near Seattle; maybe the two couples will meet and like each other.

Of course, this basically puts my blog out of business, since a good portion of my in-person socializing is done with Tom and David and Lisa. We have also seen Ann and Mac a fair amount lately, and they are moving to Sacramento on Saturday! We’re utterly abandoned. Even our rat is leaving, to be with my grandmother and Thelonious in heaven. (Oops, going to cry again. Hold on.)

Now the trick is not to cling to the idea that maybe Lisa and David will come back some day. Maybe they will, but who knows? Maybe they will really like Seattle, which by all accounts is a great place.

I will be able to get to know it vicariously, and of course it is an easy place to visit from here, a short enough flight that one could go just for a weekend, so maybe I will get to know it in person, too, which will be great.

And of course we can talk on the phone and email just as we do now. I talked to David for an hour this morning and shortly after we hung up I had another thought and called back. I said into their machine while waiting for David to answer the phone, “I feel too much time has passed since we chatted”—it had been 20 minutes—and when we hung up a few minutes later, David said, “Don’t wait so long before calling next time.”

At some point in the past several days, I thought, “I’ll have to get out there and make some new in-person friends.” Then I considered how I met my current crop of best friends: in school, at work (particularly at a job that had great meaning to me), in AA. That is, by hanging around a group of like-minded people on a regular basis.

You’d think I would have made millions of friends via the Bike Coalition, which is a huge group of extremely great people, but the only friend I ever met that way was Tom (I think that’s how we met; I can’t remember exactly), who in turn introduced me to about 20 fantastic people, including David and Lisa.

Fortunately, I have several friends I could tell anything whatsoever to. Unfortunately, mighty few of them are physically available on a regular basis, this type of friendship being a casualty of our mobile society. There is a handy clump of them in Sonoma County, at least.

I don’t know if I’ll exert myself to make new in-person friends. That might require more hanging around groups that might produce friends than I have time for.

My friend Margaux and I have sort of been planning a spa weekend, which is not necessarily my kind of thing, though I ended up enjoying the two we’ve been on. Because I’m ambivalent about this activity, I’ve not been actively pestering her about our plans. Certainly this is no reflection on what I hope will be our lifelong friendship; we met in eighth grade. However, now that my circumstances have been so suddenly and severely reduced, I have just emailed her: “Hey, when’s our spa weekend???”