creative forces

Blog # 115…March, 2021

Well, it’s almost a year since you-know-what leapt out of the darkness, changed the world and made us realize the importance of things like friendship.

I don’t need Aristotle to tell me that friendship is a major contributor to happiness. I learned that a long time ago, 1963 to be exact, when on a whim I decided to stop in Denmark and work for a while. The job I was offered was in Odense, a small city with no foreign population except the tourists who flocked to Hans Christian Andersen’s house. So I got a very authentic Danish experience, learning the language from scratch like a child, and with no guide to the customs – which are precise and many. I was forever doing the wrong thing with food, many other things too. The most important thing was, people were kind and hospitable but I had no friends.

That experience marked me forever, I’ve cherished and valued my friends ever since and this period has brought some of my notions about friendship and a deep appreciation for friends into focus. Although, or maybe because they're chosen and don’t have the background intimacy of family members, friends have some qualities that make them uniquely precious - particularly now. Some become closer due to the isolation, others recede, maybe temporarily, maybe permanently.  Random meetings at a bar or grocery store, occasional encounters when we may not even know their names, help anchor us and make us conscious of having a place in the world...but they're not happening.  And they can’t be replaced with a phone call or Zoom chat.  It becomes clear that not everything can be expected of everyone and some surprising connections emerge, that’s my experience anyway. I’ve had to become comfortable with asking friends for help and am touched by their responses and how they make it easier for me to ask.

My friend Heather keeps up on things neurophysiological and told me something recently that has profound implications for friendship. Gratitude and empathy, both essential ingredients of friendship, are mainly experienced in the prefrontal cortex, the executive centre of the brain. It's responsible for controlling the irrational emotions of the amygdala and can decrease stress. So science bears out what we feel instinctively.

Although I haven’t particularly searched them out, some books have come my way recently that explore friendships, those of women in particular.

 I discovered Rumaan Alam when he started a Tuesday book review column for lesser know authors in the New York Times as a complement to Friday’s heavy hitters. He left to publicize a book called That Kind of Mother, about a white woman adopting her black nanny’s child when the mother dies in childbirth. I found it remarkable and recently got a previous work called Rich and Pretty which I’ve just finished. It features two young girls who meet in primary school and become fast friends, and follows them into adulthood as they move apart, then back together. It’s an up close look at how interests and situations affect friendships and how they sometimes survive regardless - familiar terrain for many of us as we progress through life. By the way, Rumaan is a gay Bangladeshi/American man who somehow nails it writing about women.

Kiley Reid came to my attention on the Toronto Public Library’s Crowdcast reading series. She’s just brought out her first book, Such a Cute Age, about a young black nanny and her relationship with her white employer. There are elements of the complexities of race, relations between employers and employees, especially in an area as personal as child care, and friendship between women.  Kiley has played many roles in a variety of jobs, including being a nanny, before this book brought success.

Of course, I can’t write about women’s friendship without giving a nod to Elana Ferrante and her (or is it his?) Neapolitan Quartet. The friendship between Lina and Lenu (short for Elena) begins when they are very young in the slums of Naples, continues through adolescence into old age. It’s a tour de force with very specific reference to Italian culture, but with universal themes of love, competition, pain and loss.

And, since poems capture feelings so well, I’m dipping into Homie by Dazel Smith, who writes of friendship between young, gay, HIV positive men.  They (the preferred pronoun) explore friendship’s darkest corners, the terror of being known, saying  ”I’m sorry I have no happy poems" but calling friendship “that first and cleanest love”.

So, as advancing age inevitably comes with the death of friends, I guard fond memories of time spent together, feel lucky to have had them in my life, and cherish the ones who are still with me. And  my heart reaches out to young people missing physical contact with friends and celebrating important milestones together, we can catch up on things later, but they're missing them forever. 

See you in April, for showers, and hopefully vaccines for us all.