Gratituesday: A Little Help from my Friends
My life is probably a lot like yours right now. At home, missing the hugs and stimulation of life before physical distancing. A couple of weeks ago, a relative encouraged me to write a Gratituesday post. I acknowledge that I needed to do that and thanked her for the prod. I was, however, stuck. Not only could I not get any of my literary vehicles started in the driveway, but I also seemed to have lost the keys. I couldn’t even take a literary vehicle around the writer's block. See what I did there?
At the risk of boring you, I’ll explain why writing has been difficult right now.
Late December and January were fascinating times for me. Adrenaline packed adventures of survival and recovery. Campaigns of deep introspection and meditation. Cosmic visions for the future. Hours of emotionally fueled conversations with you all, my people, and unexpected homecomings of reconnection.
I spent a winter rewiring my life, and getting the rest to let my brain rewire itself. This struggle made for good stories, and I had cords of experiences to fuel the creative wood stove. Writing was easy in the twilight of these early-winter experiences. But then came a challenging nightfall of boredom and loneliness. In days of reclusive self-pity, I found little to be grateful for and less to write about. Trying to write about joyful experiences in the present was to try to swim in an empty pool. An empty concrete box with the lid open.
Sitting an objective distance from my internal chatter, I wasn’t happy with what I was spectating and my struggle to practice gratitude. Days sublimated without much connection and weeks blurred by. The irony, of course, is the decrease in gripping experiences correlates directly with a strong health prognosis. Life’s a bit boring because I’m safe and sound at my parent’s house.
A New Focus…
It was getting hard to write about myself all of the time. It didn’t feel right. A few weeks ago I began having frequent zoom meetings and phone calls with some of my closest friends, which helped bring me out of myself and see that I actually do have some wonderful experiences to write about.
I’m going to try my hand at writing some reflective pieces focused on friendship and compassion.
I hope I can introduce you to some spectacular people, a cocktail party of sorts, while respecting physical distancing. If my words do their job, these stories will bring a feeling of community and comfort.
First up, I’ll introduce a friend, Jamie Howard
I’m writing about Jamie because I owe her a giant thank you. More importantly, she is a phenomenal human that I want to introduce to you all.
An introduction:
Jamie is a Texan, an engineer, and a woman with a set of experiences and talents as wide as Texas itself. She’s both appeared as a contributing actress in a widely known movie and spent six months repairing medical machinery and generators in Mozambique. Most prominently, kindness is the foundation of her pursuits. She’s on a mission that flows through her career and her relationships. Jamie is one of those people that can draw the best stories out of you, listen excitedly, and then return back an experience of her own that plants both of your flags on emotional common ground. I’ve been really lucky to surf the wake of her kindness multiple times in my life and I’m stoked to share her with you.
Here’s how we met. At the dawn of our college experience, in a lab on 32nd and Market Streets in Philly, Jamie and I sat at the same oscilloscope. Neither of us had a friend in the class, so by the randomness of sitting at the same table, we first became lab partners. Over the tasks of taking apart a disposable camera and analyzing the capacity of the flashbulb, the beginning of a decade-long friendship was born. Nerd alert.
The strangeness of our relationship is that we can probably count the number of times we’ve shared the same space after our freshman year on our fingers. Three years of alternating co-op cycles in school meant that we were never on campus at the same time and Jamie was usually doing Co-Op in a different part of the world. Some experiences in life are abundant, others are potent. Time with Jamie is potent.
In 2018, Jamie invited me to take a trip with a dozen or so of her Texan friends and her siblings. We all came from hundreds of miles away and reconnected on the long road trip through high plains, down to the town of Alpine, and finally arriving in Terlingua. Right north of the Rio Grande and within eyesight of the Chisos Mountains. This weekend, in West Texas, is what I’ll call the annual Howard Family Olympics. It involves a trail marathon “at Big Bend,” a lot of vegetarian food, and heated late-night games of liar's dice. All good people, all good times. I made a dozen new friends on that trip that are scattered across the country & world. Everybody on this trip had an inspiring quality or story that’s stuck with me since. The wonders of social media keep us “together.”
I hadn’t seen Jamie in person since that trip, that is until she committed a heroic act of friendship just before the COVID era. Days after my second surgery this Winter, Jamie texted me a screenshot of a flight itinerary. A picture says 1,000 words, right? Jamie sent this picture, and six words “I am coming to visit you!” Those 1,006 words shook me.
There wasn’t a question around whether she was going to come to visit, she was-- I didn’t have a choice. How profound to step away from snowy Colorado on a prime skiing weekend to hang out with an old friend. When she announced her travel, I wasn’t so sure what I’d be up to that far out, or how I’d feel. We certainly couldn't set an agenda. And that was the power of it all-- she just wanted to be, wherever we could be, for a weekend.
When the weekend arrived, Jamie surprised me yet again with our third lab partner from Freshman year and good friend, Tanya. The three of us spent a weekend as tourists in a city we called home for 18 collective years.
We were kicked out of a sushi BYOB because we talked for so long after our meal—they gave us a gift card as consolation. I think that captures the weekend perfectly. Jamie and Tanya departed back to their respective time zones, and I went back to my routine with a weekend of hilarious memories.
PARC, in Rittenhouse, back in the distant time when handing your phone to a stranger still felt like a good idea.
For each of us, that weekend was one of the last adventures before the COVID lockdown. Jamie is home in Colorado with her partner, John. He is a Neurology nurse. Our next adventure will be a day, or two, spent on a mountain in Colorado. I’ll hold that vision in my mind until the world is right enough to make it happen.
If you’d like to get to know someone that Jamie and I both admire, check out Terry Gross’ 2018 interview with John Prine. He passed away last week from complications of COVID. He captures the human predicament in his lyrics, and I’m finding great joy paging through his albums at home. This interview remembers him fondly.
Stay safe!
