You’ve Got A Friend

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When I was little — practically from birth — I had a best friend named Bette. Her parents were good friends with my parents, and she had two older sisters whose ages roughly corresponded to the ages of my older sisters. Our two families rented houses next door to each other at Lake Hopatcong every summer. There are more pictures of her in my baby book than there are of anyone else besides me. The perfect story would be that we are still best friends, six decades later. But alas, no. We didn’t go to the same school, and didn’t even live in the same town, so it became less and less convenient, especially when both families stopped summering at the lake. We did go to camp together at Interlochen the summer we were eleven, and then after that we drifted apart. Now we are facebook friends but nothing more.

Remembering the various “best friends” I had after Bette made me wonder about what friendship means. So much of my life is written in song lyrics that naturally I started thinking about the many “friend” songs that I know. (And there are a lot of them!) Carole King probably said it best:

When you’re down and troubled
And you need some lovin’ care
And nothing, nothing is going right
. . .
You just call out my name
And you know wherever I am
I’ll come running.

Who do I know that I have always been able to depend on like that? Who would literally come running, or hop on a plane, if I needed them? My two sisters are the only people I can think of who fit this description. And they actually have done it for me, and I for them. If that’s what friendship means, they are my best friends.

I don’t tell them everything though. They grew up at a different time, and have views that are different from mine in a lot of ways. For that I need someone else, and luckily I do have one friend whom I can talk to about absolutely anything, and I know she will never disapprove or judge. We lived together after college in a house on Cambridge Street, at a time when we were both pretty wild. We know a lot of stories about each other, but of course we would never tell. Even now, forty-plus years later, we still confide in each other about all kinds of things. We each know that the other will be okay with anything we say. We live in different parts of the country, but we still manage to see each other every couple of years. And of course there are lots of phone calls, emails, texts, and facebook messages to keep us connected in between.

Most of my closest friends are women, but I have one really dear male friend who I met my freshman year of college. I dated a roommate of his, and he dated a future roommate of mine, and we became close complaining to each other about the problems in our relationships, then and later. Over the years we have seen each other through many joys and sorrows. He even crashed one of my college reunions, driving from New York up to Cambridge on the spur of the moment. There is a song in the show I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking it On the Road (which ran off-Broadway from 1978-81, and had my cousin, a semi-famous actress, in the cast) called “Old Friend,” which always made me think of this particular friend, especially this stanza at the end of the song, after the main character sings to her old friend about how she leans on him every time another relationship of hers falls apart.

We’ll meet the year we’re sixty-two
And travel the world as old friends do
And tell each other what we’ve been through.

In the 1980s I was sure that this part of the song would actually come true. Now we are both past sixty-two (how shocking!) and it hasn’t happened yet, but we are still good friends and still talk about things we’ve been through. So maybe the song didn’t quite get it right, and we’ll travel the world the year we’re seventy-two. Or eighty-two.

In addition, I am lucky enough to have several other friends who are important in my life in one way or another. Mostly from college, a couple from law school. None of them lives nearby, so we don’t see each other very often, but no matter how much time passes between visits — years, or even decades — we pick up right where we left off and it feels as if it has been no time at all. Maybe, in the final analysis, that is the real definition of friendship.

Postscript:  Two days after I posted this story, Retrospect Media made it the Readers’ Choice story and wrote about it on facebook, with the picture of Bette and me, and a link to the story. I shared that post on my page, and tagged Bette in it. A week later she read it and commented,

“Oh Suzy, I am honored to have been your friend at any era in our lives! Loved your thoughtful story – touching and so true.”

The next month she flew to Sacramento in her private plane and we had a three-hour lunch. It was the first time we had seen each other in twenty years, but we reconnected as if it had been no time. Here’s the picture from our lunch.

I don’t think we’ve changed that much from the picture at the top of the story taken when we were three.

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Stray Cat Strut

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It was the end of the summer of 1992. Ed and I had bought a beautiful big old house and moved into it with my two children, seven-year-old Sabrina and four-year-old Ben. It seemed like the right time to get a kitten. We knew if we took the kids with us to the animal shelter, making a decision would be complicated — the two of them could never agree on anything. So we decided to go on the weekend, when they were at their father’s house, and then surprise them when they came home.

At the shelter there were many sweet kittens to choose from. I fell in love with a fluffy little brown and black tabby who reminded me of my first cat, Loretta (named after the character in the Beatles’ song “Get Back” so that I could say “Get back, Loretta” in a Paul McCartney voice when she was being annoying). Ed was much more interested in an elegant all-gray one, which we later learned was a Russian Blue. We were at an impasse. So we solved the problem the only way possible, by adopting them both. They were both female, about the same size, and even though they were from different litters, we were confident we could raise them as sisters. We put them in the cardboard carrying cases and took them home.

What to name them? We decided that we would pick out names before the kids got home. We feared that they would come up with names that might not wear well, judging by what they had named their stuffed animals and other objects. For instance, Ben had named one of our oven mitts, which looked like a frog, Happy Siding. We have no idea how he came up with that name, and at this point neither does he, but we still have that oven mitt, and we still call it Happy Siding. However, if you were trying to get your cat to come inside, that isn’t the kind of name you would want to be calling out all over the neighborhood.

Since the 1992 presidential campaign was in full swing, we were inspired to name them Hillary and Tipper. We joked that if the election went the wrong way, we would have to change their names to Barbara and Marilyn. But we were betting on winning that year, which we did, so the names turned out to be perfect.

The kids were ecstatic when they came home and were introduced to Hillary and Tipper. Here is a picture taken at some later point when we managed to get all four of them to sit still for a minute, a rare event.

The cats soon learned to jump on the kids’ beds in the morning to wake them up, and they became known as the “furry alarm clocks.” For several years Ben thought it was a good idea to wear Hillary as a hat, and he invariably got scratched as a result, but that never deterred him from trying.

Six years later, in 1998, Hillary got hit by a car. Molly was two years old then, and we had a nanny who took care of her during the day while I was at work. The two of them were standing looking out the picture window in our living room and actually saw it happen. Hillary, being gray, blended in with the asphalt. There is a speed bump right outside our house, and she was lying in the curve of the street and the speed bump, and was perfectly camouflaged. I don’t think the driver in the car even knew what had happened. Hillary’s leg was bleeding, but she managed to drag herself to the bushes in front of our house. The nanny called me at work, and in her best calm-nanny voice said, “Molly is fine [they always have to assure you about the kid first], but Hillary just got hit by a car.” I had her call a mobile veterinarian who would come to our house to treat Hillary. The vet gently picked her up from the bushes and took her into his RV hospital parked at the curb. He determined that her leg was broken, but she was otherwise uninjured. He cleaned her up, put a cast on her leg, and said he thought the broken bone would heal and be fine.

The nanny kept a daily log the whole time she worked for us, where she wrote down everything important that happened. I have dozens of spiral notebooks filled with these details of Molly’s life. On May 14, 1998, under messages, it says “The mobile vet arrived at 10:05 am to treat Hillary, who was hit by a car this morning. The doctor left at 1:20 pm. I put Hillary on a towel in a box and gave her lots of TLC.” Under the list of “Molly’s Favorites” for the day was “looking through the yellow pages under vets (pictures of dogs and cats)” and later, after the swings at the playground and a walk through the neighborhood, “taking care of Hillary.”

It turned out Hillary’s bone did heal, but she developed gangrene, and the leg ultimately had to be amputated. Amazingly, she learned very quickly how to get around on three legs, and managed to do everything she had done before, even climbing on the roof of the house.

Twelve years after the accident, at the ripe old age of eighteen, Hillary died. She seemed listless for a couple of days, and we debated taking her to the vet, but we procrastinated about it, and then one morning she was gone. We were grief-stricken, and lavished extra attention on poor old Tipper, glad that she still seemed to be healthy. But I think she missed Hillary even more than we did. One day a couple of months later, without having shown any signs of being sick, Tipper died too. Neither Sabrina nor Ben was living at home then, Ben at college in Cambridge, and Sabrina in graduate school in England. It was so hard to tell them that their sweet pets were gone. Molly had gotten her own kitten the year before as a bat mitzvah present, so even though she was sad about the older cats, she was comforted by Mitzi, the mitzvah cat.

Hillary and Tipper are buried close together in our back yard near the camellia bush. Their graves, along with those of numerous goldfish, are why we can never move away from this house!

There’s a cat following us.

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From 1981 until 1987 I lived in a tiny house on Duke of Gloucester Street in Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.  The Alexander Craig Kitchen was a reconstruction of a detached kitchen from the 18th Century.  I was allowed to have a pet.  Mine was a beautiful gray cat who came to me as a kitten so small I could hold him in one hand.

Dorian Gray was born in a large pot under geraniums in North Middletown, Kentucky.  He was the smallest of a feral cat’s litter.  My friends Tom and Ree Smart rescued him.  They bottle fed him, and he slept on Tom’s lap or chest whenever Tom sat down.  When the kitten was just old enough to eat on his own, they drove to Sharps, Virginia, a small village on the Rappahannock River for a visit with Ree’s parents.  I was there, too, because Ree was my friend from four years as college roommates.  I fell in love with Dorian and named him Agnes Gray from a novel by Anne Bronte.

I showed him off to to my friends.  My friend, Diane Dunkley, was holding and petting him when she said, “Ginger, there’s something very small here, that you obviously have not noticed.  Agnes is a boy cat.”  Name change.  He became Dorian Gray from a novel by Oscar Wilde.

Dorian grew up to become an indoor/outdoor cat.  He spent his days among the visitors to Colonial Williamsburg.  His collar marked him as owned by me.  When he grew tired of being petted and photographed, he slept in the shade in the flower bed inside the picket fence that surrounded my tiny house.  At night he was almost an indoor cat.  He meowed to go out, and a few minutes later bumped on the door to be let in again.  He did this several times every evening.  His in and out routine annoyed my friend Carol so much that she would complain or cut her visits short.  “Why do you let him do that.  Make him stay one place or another.”  I couldn’t deny him that.  It was a game.

I had a day job.  I produced a newspaper for the employees and retirees of CW and along with that became the Manager of Employee Communications.  That was a good job, but I wanted to be “in costume.”  I trained to be one of the leaders of evening Lanthorn Tours of the craft 16 shops. There was not glass in the lanthorns, only thin strips of horn. My six costumes were not the fancy clothes of the interpreters in the houses and public buildings, but they were beautifully made.  They were washed or cleaned at the costume shop.  We dropped them off and picked them up.  When I left my jobs at CW, I cried when I turned them in for the last time.

Two nights a week I would meet my group of visitors at the Court House and lead them on a tour of four of the shops.  I told them about each craft for about 25 minutes and then led them back to Court House.  There could be as many as ten of us leaders out leading tours. At every shop there were caretakers who locked and unlocked the shops and kept a watch for stragglers and occasional “souvenir” takers.  They were there for security.

Dorian followed me on most of my tours.  He waited outside the shops.  Many of the caretakers knew him.  But the visitors often told me that a cat was following us.  I told them he was mine, and he was a Duke of Gloucester resident.  On those tours, he was not very open to petting.  I think he was along as my security.

I moved to California, and Dorian went along for the drive across country.  My fiance, Simon, and I sneaked him into motels. He liked to climb upside down under the bed frames.  He slept with us.  We took him for walks at rest stops .  He did not like his leash, but he liked being out of the car.  He had a “cat fit” only once on the trip.  The noise and lights of Houston were too much for him.

Dorian was happy in California.  He had a cat door so that he could go in and out whenever he wanted.  There were tree rats, and he loved chasing and catching the small ones. Don’t cringe; they were “tree” rats.  The only two I ever saw were the gifts he brought to us.

We lost him either to intentional poisoning by a mentally disturbed woman from a few blocks away who had a reputation for tossing poison into yards, or from the antifreeze the young guys next door spilled in their driveway.  Our veterinarian called me the next morning and asked me come to his office.   He said, “The kitty didn’t make it.  Do you want to tell him goodbye?  He is buried in a big cat cemetery somewhere near San Jose.  He shares a grave with many other cats.  The young guys next door were devastated. They liked him.

We have two beautiful cats now, Callie, a calico, and Pixel,a tuxedo cat.  I love them.  They have very distinctive, delightful personalities.  But when i think of Dorian, I still miss him.