Still Running With The Wolves

The picture above is from a card that arrived in the mail the other day from my old friend Cyd. We were never that stylish, of course, but she figured it would remind me of the two of us walking together down Michigan Avenue in the early 1970s.

“Who could these two young women be but us, back in the Chicago days?" she wrote.

Apparently enough women have had this kind of experience to be able to relate to it. Indeed, vintage photos of women being friends have proliferated on greeting card racks everywhere in recent years.

But Cyd took it up a notch. Inside the card she tucked a letter, a real handwritten letter. It was wonderful to hear her familiar voice in my head: the sense of humor and dismay we always shared, the ongoing commentary about our aspirations in the face of adversity and absurdity, the wry report on recent developments and references to days of old. Her letter made me laugh out loud.

"Will we never tire of recycling the stories of our friendship and young adult years?" she asked.

Probably not. We met while we were both derailed, working in that office in downtown Chicago, she an underpaid administrative assistant and me the front desk receptionist, both of us on leave from school, beleaguered by the needs of others, and often stymied by our own folly, but wanting so much more. Over the years we helped each other navigate through relationships and crises, soothed each other through heartbreaks and disappointments, and consistently cheered each other on. Key points in our geography were Chicago and Madison, Syracuse and Tempe, and in these places we managed to earn masters' degrees, fall in and out of love, try and try again.

When my father died, Cyd was the first friend I called. When I was broke and miserable, she sent me a check for $90 so I could visit her, even though she was broke too. When I was crazy and tearfully awake at 3 a.m., hers was the number I dialed, and she listened and spoke gently to me and never mentioned the time.

Maybe I was there for her too. 

“I am reminded," she wrote in her letter, "how many hopeless to-varying-extents souls you kindly prop up on a regular basis and have done so for years."

That made me feel good. I know I try but her saying so gave it special validity.

Anyway, it must sound as if we went through an awful lot of drama and tribulation, but there was also plenty of humor. We enjoyed the kind of giddy laughter that comes from a shared sensibility, an eye for the ridiculous, even in ourselves, and over the years common reference points.

"I'm re-reading Women Who Run With the Wolves," she wrote in her letter, "in case that gives you any clue as to my state of mind."

Oh, it does. I remember Women Who Run With the Wolves (by Clarissa Pinkola Estés): “Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them.” 

But how long can we keep this up?

"I am basically so tired of reconstructing my life and getting up the energy to renew," wrote Cyd.

I don't need to detail her heartache here. She's been hurt and challenged and disappointed lately in ways that might bring someone else to her knees. But I have never heard her blame anyone else or turn bitter. In her hilarious, irreverent letter she made fun of her own foibles, described her misadventures, and ended with a cheerful oh-shit. And as I said, I laughed out loud.

Then I started thinking about how humor saves us, and how crucial is the ability to earnestly go through the theatrics of life while simultaneously perceiving its comic aspects.

But there's something else that works in Cyd's favor, which is the fact that she has always been filled with wonder and love. Yes, I know that sounds sappy, but it's true.

And wonder transcends bitterness, while love…well, love transcends all. Maybe it doesn’t diminish the sorrows, but it allows us to contain them, and it takes many forms, including this oddly shaped vessel of a friendship that has endured for 43 years.

I feel sorry about the problems Cyd has been dealing with. (Even the man she's had her eye on, who might have been a nice distraction, has yet to respond to her siren call.) But I do know that the doorways we thought we wanted to enter sometimes slam shut and force us to go elsewhere and the elsewhere doors lead to different outcomes, and those different outcomes may turn out to be exactly where we belong.

I also know that sometimes we judge ourselves too harshly and critique our lives with far too much red pen, failing to notice the many ways in which we have “succeeded”, whatever that means, and not factoring in the good we've done or tried to do for others along the way, and certainly undervaluing how much we have seen and experienced and grown.

So I just wanted to talk about this a little because it made me happy and reflective to get a letter from my old friend.

And I might as well quote Women Who Run With the Wolves one last time:

“I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories... water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.”

There's a lot of blooming happening here, and a lot of outrageous hope.