What friends do

I started a post on Monday, it’s title* evidence that I am managing to make contact with my humor muse from time to time of late, and before I got very far into my tale my phone rang. It was Gayle calling to tell me that a mutual friend of ours who was in from Florida taking care of some heavy family emotional drama had broken her foot badly in a fall, and that she had been transported by ambulance from the tiny local hospital where her mother lives to our larger metro hospital and was about to undergo emergency surgery. I didn’t think twice. I shut down my computer, told my dean and the secretaries I was leaving, and drove to the hospital.

Last fall when I was trying to make myself write again I asked and asked for ideas, prompts, topics, and I got them, and then I couldn’t do anything with them, but one of them kept bobbing up from the depths of my murky thoughts. It came from my friend Passionflower, and its simultaneous simplicity and complexity intrigued me: Write about the Anns you have known. I’m not sure where this idea came from–I don’t think I ever asked her. Perhaps because it’s a pretty common name, and she had known a number of them? That makes sense, but the truth is, I have only known one, and she alone makes up for any loss I might have suffered from an absence of Anns in my life.

Ann moved to Florida a bunch of years ago–I have lost track–and I mourned her absence. We taught together for a few years, but in that time short time I felt like I had known her my whole life. She is one of those people who just makes everything better, and she “got me,” and I don’t make friends easily, so the distance was tough. Ann does make friends easily–I don’t think she has ever met a stranger–and honestly, I didn’t think she would have time to maintain our connection, what with the growing population in the state of Florida. So I was not a particularly good correspondent, even though Ann was, and to her credit she did a great job keeping in touch. Needless to say, I did not. My responses to her chatty emails and occasional phone calls were sketchy at best, and even worse after Mia was born, and recently she even asked if I was angry with her for some reason. Of course not, I quickly replied. But how do you say to a friend that this weird silence of yours has nothing to do with her, but with your own self-inflicted and insanely absurd insecurity?

Well, for starters, you do not think twice about leaving work and driving straight to the hospital and spending the better part of the afternoon looking for her elusive sister, whom you have never met, thus causing you to force yourself out of your introverted shell and walk up to complete strangers and ask, “Are you ___?” You walk into the room number the 118-year-old volunteer gave you at the front desk and then back away very quickly when you realize that although it’s been a while since you saw your friend, she is most definitely not a bald old man with a black mustache. You retreat to the nurses’ station on the floor and find out that the sweet little blue hair downstairs needs a new pair of glasses, and you make a move toward the correct room, but one of the nurses says, “She’s still in surgery, though. You can go down to the surgical waiting room and see if her family is there.” So you do that, but there’s no family there, and you know because you walk around and ask them all, and so you pester the volunteer at the desk (who, thankfully, is NOT 118 and seems to have a clue about what’s going on) and camp out next to her desk for the remainder of the afternoon, getting up from time to time to wander back upstairs and see if anyone has materialized in the room. You do all of this because you know if the tables were turned, Ann would be roaming these halls on your behalf. It’s what friends do.

I hate hospitals. I hate the way they smell. I hate the way I smell for hours after I leave. I hate the incessant beeping of machines and the clanging of beds on wheels. I hate that most of the patients’ doors are wide open and even though I try to look straight ahead when I walk down the halls, I cannot help but notice the brokenness and vulnerable despair looking back out at me. There are only a few people I’d spend time in a hospital for. One of them is my mother, and I willingly visit her at the hospital where she works with some frequency; she works in the X-ray department, so it’s not like I’m walking amid the sick and desperate, but I still have the heebie jeebies when I leave, and my repeated visits at my mom’s place of employment have not lessened my aversion. You can imagine, then, how I felt yesterday after spending an entire afternoon between a waiting room and a recovery ward. And yet.

In a few minutes I will go back and sit with my friend. I will take her the Hostess Snowballs I purchased for her at a truckstop, because they are her favorite, even though I cannot believe she willingly eats Snowballs, and even though I damn near channeled Karen Walker when an extraordinarily stinky trucker got a bit too close to me in line.  I will try, in the way that friends do, to bring her a little cheer, to remind her that even though she’s stuck here with her, uh, batshit crazy relatives, for another 14 days when she wants nothing more than to be home with her love, cradled in familiarity, I’m here for better or worse. She has certainly done the same for me.

*Yep, I’m teasing you. You’ll just have to hope I get back around to it.