Friendship

Making New Friends


On the drive to school yesterday my daughter asked me if I had made any new friends yet. This isn’t the first time she has asked me about this. Making friends is a big deal in her five year old world, and she assures me that she has made many new friends since moving here. Friends at school. At dance. With the children of people Rob and I know. And she considers herself a great friend of our next door neighbor, Charlotte. Katy can spend hours following Charlotte around as she does yard work and other outdoor chores. Of course this got me thinking, once again, about me and the friends thing. I just have never been one to make friends easily. Even when I can manage to be outgoing, I am an acquired taste it seems. Since coming here to live, I haven’t given the whole friends thing much thought. I have been more focused on activities I like and finding groups and venues that allow me to pursue them. I wonder sometimes if this will eventually lead me to friendships, but I don’t dwell on it. Still, it worries my daughter or she wouldn’t bring it up.

The majority of friends I have made since leaving college for the adult world have been made in the workplace. The trouble with job friends is that they are relative to that job. When you leave for another workplace, you leave behind those friendships. A few have survived. Meg and I met twenty years ago now and we are still good friends. Her girls are like nieces to me and if I were to have an older sister, it would be Meg. I met Sandi at Goodrell in the mid-nineties but it wasn’t until we worked together on the 8th grade team that we became friends. We keep in touch by email now, and she read this blog (Hi Sandi!), but with as a full time teacher with a husband and three little ones she is a very busy woman. Judi taught next door to me at my last teaching assignment. She is still there and we too communicate now through email. And then of course there are those I met via the Internet. My mommy friends who I post with still after nearly seven years and though I have seen pictures of them and their families, I haven’t met a single one in person yet. There is Liz on the soap board too. I don’t watch the soap anymore but I continue to keep up with her. I don’t even know what she looks like. I have met a few people through the Widows’ board. Rob, of course. But also Cheryl, who came to our wedding and we keep in touch with on Facebook. Marsha in Illinois whose blog I read. Fi and Sarah here in Canada. Fi found me through my blog and we are friends on Facebook too. Sally too is a widow friend and fellow blogger who I hope to catch up with in person one day.

Is it odd to have so many friends that I don’t interact with in the flesh? It would seem odd to my daughter. I guess it would seem odd to many others too. Without a job I am left to meet potential friends as I may. The gym is not proving to be a fertile ground for friendship, nor is the swim class I attend twice a week. I go to workout. Like reading or writing, I get in a zone and disappear. The writing groups I have joined are still possibilities. I met some really great women in the group I belonged to back in Des Moines, but I haven’t been attending the groups here long enough to know for sure yet.

I should worry more about this, I know. One of the worst side-effects losing my first husband was that I lost many of the social contacts and friends I made while we were married. Aside from my best friend, Vicki, everyone else fell by the wayside. Not that I dwell on this much, but if something were to happen to Rob, there would really be no one here for me. Most everyone I know, I know through him and if you have ever been widowed (and I imagine the same holds true for divorce) you know that your spouse’s friends are really and truly just that. His friends. At the moment though, I am usually so busy that I don’t really notice, and I guess it helps too that I have always been able to be alone. That’s not true of everyone.

I am not going to worry about it. Friends come along, like love, when you are just living your life and making the most of every minute.

Family and Friends


Rob asked me the first night back why I had wanted to make the trip here. This was after observing me with my folks when we finally arrived. Neither of my parents really listened to much of what I had to say and my mom especially would interrupt me to talk about herself. And that is just them. As I had explained to Rob before, no one in my family really gets me on a deep level or truly understands who I am. He has said himself that I am a “complex” person, though I am not sure why he thinks so. I suppose I am a contradiction at times but I am not sure that qualifies me for “complex” which sounds so much more interesting than it is.

I am not sure I wanted to come back as much as I just needed to for a bit. To check on my folks who are getting older and are not healthy, my father especially. Katy needed to see her grandparents and cousin, Luke. She has and is adjusting quite well in Alberta but she is still just a very little girl. The high school reunion thing was just a coincidence. As it turns out I will probably not see many people from back in those days. Everyone lives so far away and has significant people and family that have taken them far from Dubuque and the kids that we once were. It’s okay. I have never been one to have those BFF type relationships with people who stick with you for lifetimes and would come at the drop of the hat if called upon to do so. I find those types of friendships interesting but don’t know anyone personally who has one. And maybe no one really has someone like that. Maybe it is more the case that we have people who are supportive of us in ways we accept as good enough, often enough. If that makes any sense.

I think the biggest reason I agreed to take this trip was for the opportunity to show Rob where I came from and to spend some time off by ourselves which we haven’t had really since moving in together and marrying. My mom is a willing sitter and Katy has come to expect to be allowed to stay at my folks when we visit. This allows Rob and I the kind of one on one and intimacy that isn’t a given when you marry the second time.

My best friend, Vicki, took the day off and is driving over with her mom and daughter, Lindsay for a quick visit this afternoon. If I have a friend who comes closest to “drop everything” it is her.

Today it’s rainy. Iowa should be synonymous with “swamp” and “sub-tropic” and “Noah” as in ark. I do not miss the biblical rain season here which grows longer and longer as global warming picks up its pace. Rob and I will head out to Starbucks soon and then up to my folks. They enjoy our presence, and they enjoy fact that we are useful. We made dinner last night and cleaned up after. Rob changed the door nob on the bathroom door, so it actually locks again. I guess you can go home again, as long as you are just visiting.

Internet Sites and the Small World


Katie Coles is an old college roomie of my cousin, Anne. I vaguely recall meeting her when I first went away to college myself. Both Katie and my cousin are just enough older than I am that at the time we weren’t quite peers. She and Anne have kept up over the years and distance. My cousin was always better than I have ever been about staying connected with friends and family, but it speaks to the kind of person she is. She is glue. One of those who holds people close and keeps them near and connected not only to herself but to others.

It’s interesting who you find on the Internet. Since becoming a Facebook addict my husband, Rob, has discovered all sorts of old friends and acquaintances from high school and university. I haven’t found many people I know on Facebook but on the Classmates site, I saw a few people I know. I signed up there because my 25 year high school reunion is coming up and I wanted to track down contact information for some of my friends. As it turns out the best source of information was simply calling my friend Julie who, incidentally, is also a distant cousin of mine. I lost track of so many people when Will was sick and until now hadn’t made moves to reconnect though I had thought about them and doing that often. Having found them, I don’t do much with the Classmates site anymore, so I was a bit surprised to get an email telling me that someone had left a message for me there. It turned out to be Katie Coles.

From:
Katie
To:
Annie
Sent:
September 27, 2007 01:27:53 AM
Subject:
Hi, this is Katie, Anne Kenney’s college roomie

Hello. I was poking around seeing who’s new on the U of I listing and your name was familiar. I visited Anne in CR for a couple of weeks this summer. In fact, I went with her and Betty to pick up your mom at the airport from your wedding. I saw the pics you sent by e-mail and Anne and I “oooed” and “aaaahhhed” over them quite a bit. You are so lovely!

Anyway, although I only know you vicariously through Anne, I am compelled to say that I think you are wonderfully brave to follow your heart with a good man and I wish all the best for you, your daughter and your husband.

Katie

I am continually amazed by the effect that Rob and I seem to have on people that we don’t really know or who don’t know us except through family or friends or just from randomly hearing about our story. My dear friend Meg’s 89 year old mother is an avid follower of ours and through her a whole host of elderly friends in one of Des Moines’s senior homes is keep abreast of us as though we were an afternoon soap opera. I am also quite amazed by the way people seem to pick up on our love for each other merely through the pictures I have posted or sent to those I know. It’s not validation really and I personally don’t need that anyway. I don’t live my life by committee anymore. What other people think, as my mother always told me, is none of my business, but it is a nice feeling knowing that by just being “us”, following our hearts and living our lives, that we have touched people in a positive way. I am not sure I could have said that about my life ten or fifteen years ago. A late bloomer, I guess.

I was telling my mother about Katie’s message today, and she told me that Katie hasn’t been well. She has a very hard time getting around. Arthritis or something similar is robbing her of her mobility, but still she made the drive from Arizona to Iowa with her kids in tow to spend a few weeks with an old friend. There are so many things in life that we think of as being very important when the truth is that there are only a few things in life that merit such status. Friends are one of them.