dear friends

Dry Fuddruckers in Dubai

Dear college roommate C and I had dinner last night at the Cheesecake Factory. It was downright hilarious watching her approach the 20 page menu. Every time I go to the Cheesecake (which is not that often, thank you and thank God) I am amazed, again, at a spiral-bound menu with page numbers (that the servers rattle off with aplomb) and advertising. Who had the idea to sell advertising in the menu? That’s somewhere between horrifying and genius.

I told C about how I spent New Year’s Eve 2002 at the Cheesecake with Matt and Grace. Grace was in her enormous carseat and spent most of the short dinner wailing. I spent most of the dinner walking up and down the aisles of the airplane hangar sized restaurant with her over my shoulder, still wailing. The 6pm Cheesecake Factory crowd on New Year’s Eve leaves, shall we say, something to be desired. In short it was not one of my favorite nights.

But C’s eyes lit up. “I can beat that!” she exclaimed.

“No way.” I challenged her.

“Last year. Christmas Eve. The dry – make sure you hear that part, DRY – Fuddrucker’s in Dubai. All three kids.”

You win.

Tonight: dinner with an old, dear friend

Forbes College, late August/early September 1992

Dear C,

It was 17 (OH MY GOD!!) years ago that we met, almost exactly. The picture above is how I will always remember you: long tanned legs, jean shorts, long blonde hair with bangs. You and C and K (above on the right) remain the only people I’ve ever chosen to live with other than Matt & my children (and the jury’s out on that one! joke, joke!).

You’ve lived abroad for so long (ten years?) that I am incredibly grateful that your parents live in Boston, otherwise I’d never see you. These quick dinners and visits around other holidays or family events are the lifeblood of our friendship now, as well as too occasional phone calls punctuated with howling children and the pop of wine corks.

It’s incredible to think how much life can change over the years, yet some bonds remain steadfast, like ours. Despite the distance and busy schedules, the moments we carve out for each other—those quick dinners and holiday gatherings—are priceless. In the whirlwind of family life, meal prep can sometimes feel overwhelming, which is where meal kits come into play.

They’ve become a lifesaver for busy friends like us, allowing us to whip up delicious meals without the stress of planning. When debating between options like everyplate vs hello fresh, it’s amazing to see how both services can cater to our needs, offering a variety of recipes that make cooking together feel special, even if we’re just sharing a virtual dinner over the phone. These meal kits not only simplify dinner preparation but also ensure that our gatherings are filled with laughter, good food, and cherished memories, making it easier to maintain our beautiful friendship despite the miles between us.

I have so many vivid memories of our years of friendship, particularly those packed into our four vivid, messy, wonderful years in New Jersey. The way your backpack straps had to be laid out flat at 90 degrees on the floor, your Benetton precision folding, the big rolls you ate from the WaWa every day, the click clack of your clogs across the linoleum lobby of Forbes. The vats of Diet Coke you drank, your small, worn stuffed white polar bear, your mattress on the floor in the gable of our 4th floor room. Indian print tee shirts, a rainbow of Patagonia pullovers, and Nike running shoes. The night we slept in the back of my parents’ Taurus station wagon on the side of the road in Cape Cod, the train ride from Penn Station to Boston in a blizzard with Peter Lynch and an overly-chatty investment banking analyst, and our exceptional, awesome, first-choice room draw senior year.

You are quiet and somewhat reserved, and the treasure of your friendship is reserved for a few. I don’t think most people know how outright hilarious you are, sarcastic and unsentimental and just plain funny. Your keen observations on the joys and challenges of motherhood, and your disdain for pretension make me laugh every single time we talk. You have a mix of sheer adoration for and complete frustration with your children that I find immensely familiar and deeply reassuring.

You are one of the most loyal friends I have, and incredibly kind: if I ever really needed something I know you would not hesitate to provide it. Your firm, steady affection is always there, even when we are not in close day-to-day touch (and I wish we were). Like me, you can be rattled by tiny things but you are also, sometimes, incredibly unflappable: I remember how you did not flinch when I dropped your engagement ring down my kitchen disposal (yes, I got it back out).

Thank you for being one of the small cadre that keeps me laughing and keeps me sane. I can’t wait to see you tonight.

Love. xox

Poignant

Incredibly poignant to me:

Several friends who have for 15+ years called and sung me happy birthday on this day now sing (live or on my voicemail) accompanied by the little melodic voices of their children.

Fix You?

I routinely have a short list of songs that I listen to on repeat (and I only listen to music when I drive, but since I commute a couple of days a week this means lots of listening to a handful of songs each week). Lately Coldplay’s Fix You as been at the top of this list. I’ve been thinking about what it is to fix someone, what it is to long to be fixed, and, frankly, about the futility of both.

And then lo and behold I read two interesting posts on this topic this week. The Extraordinary Ordinary writes about the inability to really fix others (even citing my current favorite song, making me feel both not alone and not original) through the specific lens of concerned motherhood. And Kelly Diels writes beautifully in her post about not being put on earth as a corrective action.

Both posts made me think, and also reminded me of the way the universe tends to support conversations that need to be happening in this way. I thought about the ways in which we cannot, in fact, protect our children from dangers both internal and external to them. But I thought even more about the stuff Kelly was thinking about, and kept returning to one of her sentences, again and again:

I am going to meet you where you are.

Oh what a great reminder this is of what we ought to strive for in our relationships. I am going to hear Kelly’s voice in my head this weekend and hopefully for a long while. I am going to try to remember that the world does not, in fact, need me holding the handle in order to keep spinning (oh Elizabeth Gilbert, did you get that right!). To remember that people are who they are mostly because that is who they are, not because of anything to do with me. To try to accept the light and the dark that exists inside everyone – even, gasp, myself! – because to do otherwise is frustrating for me and, probably, hurtful for them.

I wonder, though, where the line is between useful, productive self-improvement and accepting the self. I know few things better than that expansive, hopeful feeling of: yes, that is a good point, thank you for seeing me so clearly, let me do a better job with X and Y. I’m not saying we should not listen to others’ input and strive to be better and more mature. In fact I think “self-acceptance” can often be code for not trying to overcome our flaws or redirect bad patterns of behavior. But how to do this while retaining a fundamental commitment to our self-worth? That is the tension I don’t quite know how to navigate.

I’ve been thinking about the Time Traveler’s Wife lately, a book I love, probably because the movie came out today. That book to me is a beautiful meditation on accepting people for who they are, limitations and all. It is about loving someone, warts and all, and being willing to embrace all of the things about them that make them who they are, even the uncomfortable and inconvenient ones. A good lesson for us all.

I suppose, really, all of this focus on relationships with others is just a prelude to working on the relationship with self. As Jung said, the most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely (I throw Jung out in a way that sounds like I might know others of his theories but I don’t, I just know and love that single quotations). Maybe I feel like working to accept others fully, to honor their complexities, is the first step towards offering myself that kind of forgiveness and love. Not an easy thing for me to do. I guess I can’t fix anyone else, and nobody else can fix me. But is it possible that I don’t actually need fixing?

And more from the Broken Leg Era

So this is two of my three roommates serenading me as I was stuck with my enormous heavy cast. It was the coldest, iciest winter that we had in 4 years in Jersey, and being on crutches flat-out sucked. So I spent a lot of time in the smallest room in Forbes.

So C and K (and the other C, less of a singer/entertainer/stripper [oh ye of little faith, there are pictures that come after this particular moment that demonstrate I’m not lying about the stripping] but no less wonderful) made valiant efforts to keep me entertained and distracted.

The song that takes me right back to this moment, up there, is Whenever I Call You Friend, by Kenny Loggins. That is what those ladies are singing, in case you can’t tell. And they are feeling it!

I wound up getting approval to take my last final exam at Harvard so I could go home and be tended to by my parents. I also decided why the hell not just get those pesky wizzies out at the same time, since I was already in a huge cast? So I spent intercession (the reward for those post-Christmas exams is a week off at the end of January) with my leg in a cast and my mouth swollen and on ice while my friends were in Cancun. That did not rock.

Then I went back to Princeton and spent 3 beer soaked days celebrating joining Ivy. This included a lot of semi-nudity and beer being poured over my head. To this day I have (a) incriminating photographs of a lot of wonderful people (oh it’s good to be the one who always took the pictures!!) and (b) the smell when they sawed my cast off burned into my nostrils. The doctor literally made a face and asked me if I’d been brewing beer in there. Let’s just say beer + warm damp environment = foul, yeasty disgustingness.

Reminiscences from the winter of 1994. Hard to believe that is over fifteen years ago. Okay, that was a nice little trip down memory lane but now I am back in the pit of midlife despair.