08/29/97

True Friendship

The neighborhood roots are moving next Friday. Their house has been sold. The kitchen table which has absorbed the tears, the fisted blows, and the heat of 25 years of soothing teas will soon squeeze into the back of an overloaded Ford stationwagon bound for Michigan, 1000 miles away. With it will go a woman of unselfish generosity and wisdom, who has been the soul and glue on our block for all these years.

Other families have come and gone; she and her family have stayed. Almost every day, it seems, one of us agonized over decisions and sought valued advice at that table. She helped us figure out how to cure allergies, learning disabilities, and shyness; how to inspire talent, resolve marital spats, and even tame unruly animals. Then, quite unexpectedly, her husband lost his job as vice-president of an advertising firm. Hope kept them going for the ensuing four years of unsuccessful job hunting, while they steadily depleted their savings and their marriage. Neither survived. After four years of torment, our friends will start separate lives.

One more casualty of the recession, this family is scattering. Extended family will house the woman, her younger daughter, and their dog and cat. Her ex-husband will live with friends and work as a department store clerk while he continues to search for work more appropriate to his background. Their two older children, a son in college and a married daughter, live in other parts of the country. They have planned visits to their mother, father, sister, and extended family to give and receive needed love and reassurance. People cope somehow.

We were lucky to have such stability in our midst for so long. No one seems to live in one place for longer than ten years anymore. Rarely do we have the luxury of making lifelong friends, especially whole families of lifelong friends. Instead of putting down deep roots in one place, we're learning to spread horizontal ones across the miles, nourishing them by mail or phone.

That is what we can offer our friend now. Through our network of friends and family members we can help her find another neighborhood for her table. This is no time to feel sorry for ourselves for our loss. It is time to share with her what she shared with us: the capacity to be a true friend.

A friend is one to whom one may pour out all the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that the gentlest of hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping and with the breath of kindness blow the rest away. -- Arabian Proverb

Readers, please write to me about a friend who has deeply touched your life.

Please send questions or comments to bbruno@snet.net.