Real Friendship. Pass It On.

 First of all, this blog Is dedicated to a really cool kid named Mike.  It’s weird because he just turned 18 so is he really a kid?  Yeah. 

I've been friends with his mother Theresa/Terry/Terri/Teri/Tess since fourth grade, and that is how many times she’s modified her name since then.  We were really good friends as kids.  We were part of a group who stayed together in a special ed program.  It was the first years of the gifted program in our school district so it was kind of like an experiment.  They combined grades and added special programs and tried a bunch of different teaching techniques which were progressive and groovy back in the late 70s.  Then after diagramming sentences (which I totally love to this day and am way bummed it’s out of fashion), adding scraps to our compost heap in back of the school, and meditating for 15-20 minutes, we would go to each other’s houses and watch ELO concerts on PBS eating fluffernutter and banana sandwiches.  And it turned out, most of us stayed friends (with the occasional teenage fall outs and losing touch while navigating the whole adulthood process) and share a very special bond to this day.  In fact, we actually had a sleepover at one of our houses to celebrate our 50th birthdays, but I digress.

So recently, Theresa/Terry/Terri/Teri/Tess (I guess I will call her Tess now since everyone has for the past 25 years, but you know how old habits are) came to visit me from Sweet Home Chicago to my relocated residence in Brooklyn with her two kids, Mike and Blake, who are almost exactly the same ages as my two.  She wanted the kids to meet and do some fun NYC stuff, and of course my door is always open to her as is my guest room, couch, air mattress, fridge, and anything else she can find.  In typical Tess fashion, she made an itinerary filled with museums and parks, and places I’d never even heard of, covering just about every second of every day, and kudos to her kids for getting up early and following the plans.  Unfortunately, my kids were still in school (different winter break weeks) and I had to work a lot, but we made it work.  They did stuff without us, or just without me, and we got to hang out when I got home from work.  Of course the first night we found out on the subway into the city that our broadway show (which everyone had miraculously agreed on) was cancelled due to Covid, but we rolled with it… or at least 2/3rds of us did, and bravely  veered from the itinerary to see something cool that didn’t make the cut, and we had a good time.  And we always had a lot of fun talking and snacking at home before exhaustively calling it a night.

As I mentioned, I had to work a lot during the visit. I know many people leave the headspace of their jobs when they walk out the office door , but when I get home from the dental office where I work, I am usually pretty ramped up and want to talk about my day.  The office is in the heart of south Brooklyn, with a nice mix of real Brooklynites, from the generations of old timers to immigrants of several generations, from all around the world.  All ages, basically salt of the earth city workers, teachers, college students, musicians, etc, with a plethora of experiences and personalities and at least one thing in common: no one wants to be at the dentist, and some days are just insanely crazy.  And I do like to tell stories.

 

Unfortunately for me, no one in my family really wants to deal with me when I get home from work.  Often it’s late, my family is winding down, and my energy level is way too high and way too annoying for them, so my crazy day stories go untold until I’m ready to burst.  But when Tess and her kids were here, Mike was a ready and willing audience, excited to hear about nutty Brooklyn, and I was ecstatic to oblige.

It really is something new and amazing almost every day at the office, so I happily regaled Mike with tales of patients physically fighting in the waiting room, dentures getting lost, altercations with insurance companies, power outages, patients losing touch with reality, staff being threatened, rudeness, and of course lots of cursing because after all, it is fucking New York City.  Honestly, these kinds of things happen every day, but most people don’t even notice.  It’s like when you live near the airport you just stop hearing the planes after a while, but even though I’ve lived in NYC for 22 years, I still see the crazy.  The absurd situations 

that couldn’t even be imagined as fiction.  Like the guy who came in with no appointment, sat in the waiting room menacing the receptionist and refused to leave unless we gave him $35, and after his negotiations turned futile, he peed himself and tried to bash in all the windows with a metal bar (two days ago). Seriously I had never called 911 until I moved to NYC. That day was my fifth phone call, my previous one reporting a van full of Rastafarians that flipped over right next to me on the Belt Parkway.

OMG, I had so much to tell, and Mike hung onto  every word.  He fell off his chair hysterically laughing several times, asked for details, and at one point declared he had to move here and work in the dental office to experience the spectacular insanity for himself.  He totally got it the way I do.   It was perfect symbiosis:  I had someone who wanted to hear my stories, and he got tales of unbelievable lunacy that knocked him to the floor.  And making one of my best friend’s kids laugh just filled my heart.

I didn’t get to see enough of my amazing forever friend Tess, and her kids Mike and Blake,  but I completely enjoyed really getting to know them.  They are both exceptional people, and I am so proud of my friend who used to come to my house and eat onion bagels with jelly and knock the same chrome lamp onto our green shag carpeting every time.

One thing I notice in the dental office is that money trumps people these days.  NYC is expensive, and people are piled on top of people so you end up constantly competing for everything, including  space.  It’s brutal and exhausting, but this visit reminded me that real friendships and laughter, and sharing your families is what makes life worth living.  Everyone has his own story and survival tactics in this world and who knows how off the charts their experiences have been, so I personally do my best to be kind whenever possible, and as my tattoo quotes the Dalai Lama, “It is always possible”, or at least most of the time in NYC.

So thank you Theresa/Terry/Terri/Teri/Tess for giving me you, Mike and Blake.  I know we didn’t see each other enough, but the love will always be there, for you and your amazing people that make my world better, and lots of other people’s now and later.  I wish we would have spent more time together, but truthfully I’m not getting up at 9am to ride the Staten Island Ferry… ever.