Nice Matin

Making friends was as effortless as child's play when we were kids. They slid into the seat next to us in class or lived across the street.  It would have taken an act of will (unless you were Andrea Menschler) to avoid having an abundance of close pals. 

Creating new friendships has been a whole different deal for me as a middle-aged adult.  It takes effort that doesn’t always feel natural, or mutual, or even desirable.  Many of my peers feel more or less set.  We’ve got a comfortable (albeit dwindling and, I’ll say it, dusty) circle, and families that take time and energy and come close enough to satisfying the social urge.  We are too busy to do what it takes to forge new bonds, or to care that we haven’t. We cherish our lazy down time.  I’m pretty selective, and the special brand of smart, literate, edgy engagement I look for seems to get rarer as my ice floe melts. I’m more crotchety, and quirks I might have ignored, tolerated or been amused by in the past rub me deal-breakingly raw now.  The people I work with are often g.u., off in the burbs, and disinclined to find a way to schlep into the city.  And (is this at all universal?) I have an idealized definition and memory of close, intimate girlfriend-ship from youth that hasn’t quite translated itself into something workable at my age.  I don’t always know quite what I’m permitted to want or expect from friends now, and I am left feeling a little unsatisfied despite earnest efforts.

Happily, things (and/or I) have begun to change in the past few years.  My age-mates and I have been empty-nested of late, and we have rediscovered energy, and loneliness, or at least a social urge.  And we have been finding each other, and truly celebrating whatever small nibbles we feel mutually peckish for.  Sometimes we even feast ravenously, but it’s not a requirement.  I’ve been getting the hang of imperfection and load-sharing: it’s all right to enjoy aspects of people, and to have different friends for different needs.  Book friends, dining friends, analysis buddies, movie partners.  The childhood fantasy of perfect, twin-like intimacy can only be nurtured if you have a contextual, runny identity, or are a blind narcissist.

AKA a child. 

So I brunched with Olive and Helen yesterday, a lovely, casual, UWS French bistro called Nice Matin.  Helen and I met almost two years ago at my school when she was mentoring a new teacher, and was subsequently hired to co-coach with me one day a week.  Helen schleps in from the Island (happily so, but schleps for two hours, nonetheless).  She is kind and generous and edgy and literate.  She has two daughters close to my girls’ age and interests, and we have a ton in common.  She is not a foodie, to say the least (except, mysteriously, when it comes to Indian food), so we do not kvell over the meal.  She orders chopped salad, eats to live, and we talk nutrition instead of gastronomy.  Helen is exquisitely sensitive, about both her own feelings and others’.

Olive, on the other hand, is what we call a character.  She and I knew each other casually for years when we would meet at occasional staff development conferences, and she was also hired to co-coach with me once a week.  She and Helen and I hit it off famously. She is passionate and opinionated, takes and offers big bites both literally and figuratively, and is something of a delightful bull in a china shop.  She talks and laughs and lives with volume.  She takes a car service in and out of the city from Yonkers, orders mojitos and frogs’ legs and shares gleefully and insistently.

It was a lovely day.  We celebrated Olive’s birthday and my sabbatical, ate and kvetched and kvelled, got old-lady tipsy on very little, shared gifts, yakked non-stop.  Then they schlepped back to the burbs, and we eagerly await the next brunch occasion.  We will probably not speak on the phone till then, though we may email, and Helen and I “see” each other almost daily on Facebook.  We are not intense, undying bffs, exactly, but whatever we are feels rich and wonderful and enough.

I’m enjoying the hell out of this new brand of old-lady friendship. 

I’m really sort of enjoying the hell out of being an old lady, period.