Friends

Make new friends and keep the old. One is engaged in a lengthy application process and the other one's gold.

Temptress (1969), Jane Graverol

This summer has felt like a real summer, maybe because I drive through the green woods to the lap pool every single day and I swim for a whole hour. Swimming for an hour makes you very tired and also very hungry. I love being hungrier than usual and eating more than usual.

“I’m kind of aggravated today,” Bill told me yesterday when I got home from the pool.

“Do yoga for a few minutes, you’ll feel better,” I said.

“Yeah I should,” he said.

“But what you really need is daily cardio,” I said. “When you work out for an hour a day, you don’t have the energy to get pissed off about anything. Something annoying happens and you don’t even care, you’re just thinking about what you want to eat next.”

“That’s true,” Bill said.

“And you’re so hungry that every single time you eat, it feels like the ultimate luxury. Swimming for an hour a day makes some stubby carrots and some old hummus seem indulgent and thrilling.

“I know,” he said. “I have to…”

“And even when you’re not eating, just sitting down in a comfortable chair feels satisfying. You can flip through a magazine like a normal person. Getting worked up over some petty conflict seems stupid, when compared to reading about why Gwyneth Paltrow broke up with Ben Affleck 30 years ago.”

“Why did they break up?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t read that article yet. Probably his skin looked ashy but he wouldn’t put on lotion or put down his cigarette and his donut.”

Then Bill did a little yoga. He had to do it about two feet away from me and my bigger dog, Fig, who just had her gallbladder out. Guess how much that costs? I should’ve had my front lobe removed instead, then I’d learn to say no to the question “Do you want to transfer your dog to the specialty animal hospital that offers 24-hour care?”

We are all packed into the living room all day long because we are the ones giving Fig 24-hour care now, thanks to the fact that after her surgery we demanded that she come home because we had no more kidneys left to sell, so we refused to pay the $2000 a night it costs for her to recover like some post-op Housewife of Beverly Hills.

Instead we are the post-op Beverly Hillbillies. My poor 83-year-old mother has to step around a drugged-up dog with a clown cone on her head just to get to the staircase that leads to her blessedly empty bedroom. And that’s not to mention the two human clowns and their clown children and all of their clowny bullshit that’s clogging up every corner of her previously serene and comfortable house. Did I mention that my aunt arrives today for a visit?

The main goal when you get past the age of 50 is to avoid starting any fights with your closest friends or your family. The second goal is to avoid injuring yourself. I want to say that 70% of getting old is just avoiding injury, and another 20% is avoiding people you’ll eventually want to fight with, mostly because they’re too boring to tolerate. The remaining 10% is all about hanging out in shared spaces with new people until you can figure out who is interesting and who will bore you out of your mind. This takes a long time so you have to do something while you’re waiting.

Right now I spend about 5 hours a week at the pottery studio, but it really should be more like 15 hours because I have a lot to do. I have to make plates so I can carve squirrels into them and paint them with slip. I also need to make some bowls and some vases. I have a ton of short vases but I need some tall ones. This takes focus.

I also need to determine which of the people around me are worth befriending. This should take 3-4 years. Your smaller towns require forming solid friendships in slow motion, because there are no backsies. Once you’re in, you’re committed, because you’re going to bump into that motherfucker everywhere you go.

Yesterday, a woman I never thought could be a friend – too young, too energetic, too positive, probably too healthy and balanced – told me that she carved a message in the bottom of a mug she made for her husband. I imagined all of the upbeat shit she probably wrote in the bottom of the mug: Love you forever, You’re my best friend, Can’t believe I get to share this life with you, etc.

So I asked her what message she carved.

“Stupid old bitch,” she said.

She’s on the potential future friend list now. Let’s see if she can nail the rest of her interview over the next three years.

***

Most men don’t have friends. They’re too impatient, plus they don’t have hobbies so they don’t have any excuse to just sit around with other people and shoot the shit for three or four hours straight.

That’s my theory. But a few days ago, I was having lunch with two friends and one of them said she thinks men don’t have friends because they don’t feel comfortable talking shit about their wives and girlfriends, so they can’t bond with other guys as easily as we do.

“That’s very true,” my other friend said, “and it’s pretty unfair.”

“My husband complains about it all the time,” my first friend said.

“But what are we supposed to do?” I said. “Marrying a man is way harder than marrying a woman. It’s like ‘I married a salamander. Who can I talk to about it?’”

We all cackled like witches at this. Then we finished our enormous roast beef and meatball subs. If we were really good witches, we might cast a spell that could turn our husbands / boyfriends from salamanders back into normal people. But then we’d have nothing to laugh about while we ate delicious sandwiches.

***

Yesterday, Bill was alarmingly human-like and not salamander-like at all, so I told him how a nurse had called to say that my uncle, who’s in memory care, was getting combative with the staff. This wasn’t like him, so they thought he might have a bad cold or a UTI.

“I wonder if he’s angry that his toilet still leaks,” Bill said. “Your mom’s been trying to get them to fix that toilet for six months now.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Do you think having dementia makes a leaking toilet even worse? Like every day you discover that it’s leaking and it makes you mad all over again?”

“Probably,” I said. “Some people wake up and they rediscover that their husbands are dead.”

Bill didn’t say anything.

“They find out for the first time, every single morning.”

Bill was staring at his computer not saying anything.

“So it’s almost like their husband is dying over and over again.”

Bill didn’t look up.

“You just asked me a question and then didn’t listen to the answer.”

“Sorry, sorry,” he said, finally looking up. “They… find out… their husbands are dead, over and over. How would that feel?”

“Oh, it might not be so bad.”

***

Yesterday I went to the pool to swim for an hour and instead I talked to this guy in the next lane from mine for an hour. He’s 20 years older than me and he just walks back and forth in the water these days, because he has a skin graft on his ear and about four other medical problems that he didn’t want to bore me by mentioning. He wasn’t a boring person, though, which is why I ended up walking back and forth in the pool in the lane next to him for an hour without noticing that my swimming time was running out.

Then he moved to the free lane, which you don’t have to reserve, and I shared the lane with him and swam because the rest of the lap pool was full of people. I actually hate to share a lane — I’m not a good enough swimmer for that yet — but I needed to get my laps in or I wouldn’t be able to return to the clown house and deal with all of the clowns. Plus I’m going to the beach next week and my knee might not tolerate running in the sand, which means I won’t be doing enough cardio to stay cheerful. So I’m frontloading all of my cardio right now.

“It doesn’t work that way,” you want to tell me now, because you’re a salamander.

That’s a thing that this guy who I swam next to kept saying. He’s that type of guy who challenges everything you say. He would ask me questions like who’s your favorite author and what kind of music do you listen to and then he’d make facial expressions and sounds that quickly revealed themselves to be a complex personal grading system (Updike, Chopin: A+, Julia May Jonas, Bjork, anyone born after 1940: C-). He raised his kids on a beautiful island in Maine (close to Bar Harbor!) and they all went to Ivy League schools and they’re all successful professionals now because he gave them all of the great works of literature, discussed important intellectual topics with them around the clock, and kept them away from pop culture.

This made me feel slightly combative even though I don’t have a cold or a UTI. So I told him that I raised my kids in LA and we went out for boba around the clock and watched reality TV and violent anime together. He said he didn’t mean to be so superior about his choices and I said oh I’m just defensive because an island in Maine definitely sounds more pure, plus my kids do love TikTok a lot and I just let them love TikTok until they hate it, because that’s what I do with everything. I just want them to learn to regulate themselves the way I do. I indulge myself, sure. I waste time on a lot of stupid shit. But eventually I make an adjustment and it’s all my choice, not someone else’s.

To be honest, swimming next to this dude was a pretty indulgent choice. I was recklessly fast-forwarding through the first year of our friendship without any thought to the fact that I’d have to see him every single fucking day for the next god knows how many years of my life, since we swim at the same time every afternoon. Soon I’d be paying for his gallbladder surgery and adjusting his clown cone, in between the countless other 24-hour care visits I’d be making to the 50 other people I’d befriended by then.

There are real risks to throwing yourself into the community with enthusiasm. I probably needed to dial it all down a little.

But as I finally got out of the pool, my new friend told me I was a great conversationalist, and also very beautiful and lively and special, and even though most of you are thinking “Ewww” and “Go buy an actual salamander and stop this madness,” I might be different from you. I like it when people are direct about how impressed they are with me. Why else would I keep so many salamanders around at all times? Salamanders are easily impressed when… well, when your ass looks like a flotation device.

Yep, my ass still looks great. My ego is clinging to it like it is a flotation device at this point, as everything else falls apart in slow motion. Making it past the age of 55 is like the final sinking scene in the Titanic, except slowed down to last three decades.

But don’t worry. My potential future swimming buddy still has to nail the next two years of his interview in order to seal a spot on my friend list. And I still have lots of time to fail my own interview with him. I could just tell him exactly why Gwyneth dumped Ben Affleck thirty years ago in excruciating detail and he’d probably never talk to me again.

I still have options. As long as I’m not starting any fights and I’m avoiding injuries, I give myself an A+.

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