Ode to Friends

By Andrea Scarpino

Los Angeles

I leave for Germany on Thursday to visit one of my best friends, Chris, who is amazingly astute, isn’t afraid to discuss difficult topics or act silly, to drink wine and eat s’mores until we both feel sick. She once brought me an entire birthday cake to celebrate my cat’s birthday. She visited me when I lived in France, and didn’t bat an eye when I let the bidet overflow in our hotel room. When my father died, she flew to the funeral immediately, no questions asked. I remember standing at the back of the church with my family and his coffin, and beginning the processional down the church aisle. I wasn’t expecting to walk my father’s body down the aisle, and I felt myself begin to disintegrate. Then, I looked up and saw Chris’ face. It’s okay, she mouthed to me. And I knew it would be.

There are moments like that in any friendship that I don’t think you ever forget. Days after Kerry lost the 2004 presidential election, I met with Steve on campus. He knew how hard I had worked, not necessarily to get Kerry elected, but to get Bush out of office, ignoring my thesis to register voters, make sure their registrations went through, offer them rides to polling places on election day. Campaign workers from out of state slept in my living room for weeks at a time. Knowing all that work had only meant four more years of Bush as president was devastating.

I don’t remember why he had to leave, but Steve left me in his office with his guide dog Vidal to sit as long as I wanted. So I sat in his office filled with towering shelves of poetry and an amazing dog and I read parts of books and listened to Steve’s opera CDs, and Vidal snored in his sleep and let me pull him onto my lap and I felt so grateful to have a place of beauty like that to sit in quietly when feeling so sad, so useless in the world.

Another best friend let me live with her for an entire year in high school, let me share her bathroom and shoes, gossiped with me about boys as we studied for our SAT’s, fell into giggling fits with me at exactly 9 every night. And another helped me get through graduate school, still reads all of my poetry, still helps me be kind to myself. Once, I called her semi-hysterical after slicing deeply into my hand while trying to cut a sweet potato. The first thing she said was, Sit down. The second thing, Breathe. And that remains some of the smartest advice I’ve ever received. I have friends who have baked me muffins and cupcakes when I needed them most, introduced me to now-favorite music, let me sleep on their floor or sofa or bed much longer than I deserved, given me money and plants and clothing, taken me to concerts and plays and improv theater, let me laugh louder than anyone else in a restaurant without ever shush-ing me in shame, helped me think through relationships.

If you watch too much reality TV, you might think friendships are disposable things, that they come and go with the season based on whomever most fits your needs at the moment. But I like to think of friendships as lasting into old age, of calling a beloved friend on the phone from my nursing home and laughing, still, about the time we got lost and drove hundreds of miles out of our way. Which happened, one time, when driving home with Chris from a music festival. When we finally saw the Cincinnati sign, it read, 100 miles. We’d already been driving for something like nine hours. I remember turning to Chris and saying, Oh, we’re not far now at all. And then we both laughed. And kept laughing.

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit her at:

www.andreascarpino.com

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto