Sunday,
April 4, 2004.
Copyright©2004. All rights reserved.
NO
SUNDAY POST. Well, the thing is that I am shifting focus for
a bit to a new freelance website I am building. And so, I am
neglecting this baby for a bit. Just need to gage my focus
on one thing at a time. I am doing articles for the new site
and so, I will be back by the end of April once the freelance site
is launched. Thanks for dropping by. Gale
Here is an old
post to ponder.
Foot
prints and sand castles
November 8, 2003
We make several
connections throughout our lives--each with a different level of
emotion attached. Some of these relationships touch us to
the very core of our soul and never cease to let up on our
emotions. And as the years come between us, we look back
upon these friendships, occasionally, when we look up from our
busy lives, and wonder where have all the years gone, and did his
cardboard dreams blow over in the wind?
I used to know an
East Indian girl named Nadine and we became fast friends for
all of five months before I moved away...I think that we were on
our way to being best friends...we promised to write, but somehow
never got around to it...I have never forgotten her, and I often
wonder about the woman that she has become or the places she has
been in her life. Tanya was South African with the most
wonderful accent and the whitest blonde hair and neither of us
knew what apartheid was as we were too busy giggling over Paul
Lopez. It wasn't until years later that I realized that most
of South Africa wasn't as open-minded as her family.
At fifteen, there
was Gita who was from Pakistan and struggling with the western
ways and its collision with the values of her very strict father. I
admired her efforts of not being forced into those little boxes
that religion and culture try to put us into. I know in my heart
that she did not end up in an arranged marriage because her
independent spirit just would not allow itself to be contained...I
think I remember these early friendships because we were little
women on the verge of becoming real women.
Who ever said
that men and women can't be friends? Larry Caruana left footprints
(no finger prints as we were not lovers) behind. He possessed a
brilliant mind and we would have these deep exchanges about
our world and our creative endeavors. He was beautiful
specimen with long limbs, long black hair and sensual sculptor's
hands and a genius mind. I read his book, "Scream of
Consciousness" from cover to cover about eight times. He went
home to Malta in the Mediterranean to join a monastery and forge
the art that was inside of him. Instead, he ended up
trivializing the quest for his own truth with a string of
disastrous love affairs that he wanted so badly to look like love.
He and I shared
this spiraling journey through 40- paged letters back and forth.
With him, I could talk about the intangibles--he got the
subtleness and ethereal quality of life, though he was
messed up about the here and now, and the place he could carve out
for himself in this world. We were never lovers because of
limitations on his part. His idea of love did not look like me.
For him, love was an idea. That friendship had a limited shelf
life--and I knew that before it began because I was willing to
take him only part of the way on his journey. We had to
meet to learn from each other.
The people I
learned the most from are the ones I consider to be kindred
spirits. In my adult life, I have found a few kindred
spirits along the way...namely my bohemian hippie flower-child
kindred spirit Birgitta, Sharon, my forever friend and my
like-minded where love is concerned friend Myra. Birgitta
and I met at three in the morning in a crowd of about 300 people
at one of those after hours booze-can...Birgitta is one of those
people who is entirely her own person with a style all of her own.
She trapezes around the world with back pack in tow and feels
comfortable in any backyard. I admire her adventurous
soul...we share a lot of things of the soul including the
man in the moon.
It
is strange to think about, but with all the people I have
met in my life, I have never had a best friend in a woman.
The friend that comes closest to that is Sharon, who is Jamaican.
She is ,also, the friend that I have known the longest and the one
with whom I share the least sensibilities. We don't talk
about the soulful things because she isn't wired that way. We talk
about the things life throws at us and we have to deal
with...domestic, finances--well, she mostly deals and I just
listen and give my best advice which she takes and thanks me for
listening. She is possibly my best friend, though I have not
labeled it as such. Though, so very different, we will remain
friends forever.
This nostalgic
feeling about the people who have left their footprints in my life
started this summer as I was approaching forty. Just the other
day, I was thinking about the times when Myra and I stayed up all
night with a bottle(s) of wine talking about all the little
absurdities of life, or the love that befell or betrayed our
hearts--mostly her heart. She thought I was wise or some
misguided notion like that. We were both looking for that
"boom" where love is concerned. She found
hers and I found mine. This past August, I went to Myra's wedding
and the tears fell as I remembered the shenanigans over the past
16 years we have known each other.
It felt as if I,
somehow, had a hand in delivering her safely to adulthood into the
waiting arms of her husband. I felt as if I had given away a
child. Funny, that I should feel this way, but she was the one
with all the drama. Oh, the stories I could tell. At
the wedding, I got the strangest feeling. I was crying for
all the hilarious times gone by and my life was flashing before my
eyes in slow-motion and it occurred to me that we have all been
delivered to our respective places in life, and though we have
moved on and things will never be the same, my friendships have
been colorful and purposeful.
Over the years,
we didn't just pass time together--we were building sand
castles--and although washed away by the tide of life, the
footprints in the sand will forever remain. comments
