As we approach the anniversary of the day I turned 50, we also enter the anniversary season of my most hare-brained, brilliant gimmick ever.
A year ago today I was at Ghost Ranch outside of Abiquiu, New Mexico. Georgia O’Keefe spent the later decades of her life on the ranch in a little squat and square adobe home. From her porch, the expanse of the red mountains I recognized from a lifetime of losing myself in her paintings.
I went to Ghost Ranch for a music festival where Patti Smith was headlining. Despite a childhood and early adulthood filled with Rocky Mountain trips, and some pre-surgery travels to New Mexico and other high-altitude spots, I got walloped with altitude sickness. Not ideal, but it was a great lesson in listening to my body and arranging what I do based on how I felt. It was a great time. On the flight home, I had an incredible first listen to the new Afghan Whigs album, and, fueled by mountains and music and moxy (Jesus Christ), I undertook The Birthday Meals.
I have a history of bad birthdays. As in, people die. My mom started laboring with me at my uncle’s funeral visitation (late 40s, heart attack).
Nineteen years later, after a long battle with brain cancer, my paternal grandmother died the day before my birthday. It took years to recover from that one, from going to her visitation on my birthday and having strangers say, “So sorry for your loss. Happy birthday!” and “Wow, we were doing this 19 years ago for Clayton. And then you were born!”
Want to make a slightly gothy baby adult with depressive tendencies fall face-first into her first big depressive episode? That’s one way to do it.
Leading into my 50th birthday, my maternal grandfather was dying. I made a hurried trip to visit him one last time on his 98th birthday, a week and two days before my birthday. And a week and three days before he died.
This time it didn’t feel like a slap in the face. Being very aware that it’s damn near a goddamn miracle to be 50 years old with a living grandparent softened the blow. Now, I view the connection between my birth and the death of three of my ancestors as a gift. I can never lose my connection to Clayton, Granny Opal, and Grandpa Chuck. It’s seared into my calendar.
At this time last year, I was six months past my second knee replacement. I’d experienced recovering for four months as the last of my 40s ticked by. And I was ready to do the exact opposite. I wanted to reconnect in a way that a birthday party wouldn’t allow. I posted this on all my social media accounts, telling everyone who cared to read it that I wanted to share a meal with them. One-on-one (or maybe two-on-one because I have some couple friends) meals. Didn’t matter which meal. They had to pick the restaurant (because I have Libra decision-making skills [none] and I didn’t want to pick places where my companions weren’t comfortable.). No one was allowed to pick up the tab or bring gifts. I just wanted to spend time with people that I call friends. I didn’t care how much time had passed since we’d last talked, what terms we were on, if we only knew each other online, whatever. Just name a day, time, and restaurant and I’d be there. We’d eat. We’d talk. They’d let me take a selfie of us.
But this isn’t about the individual meals, of which there were 34 from September 15 through December 31. It’s about connection, that thing I’ve craved my entire life and have struggled to make with the other humans far too much.
Towards the beginning of this hare-brained best idea I’ve ever had, I got a message on Instagram from a friend I hadn’t seen or spoken to since early 2013. The details aren’t important. This person (I’m protecting identities because I don’t mind airing my dirty laundry but I don’t want to air anyone else’s) had decided after some time apart during a stage of both of our lives that included tremendous upheaval and change, that they didn’t like the person I had become. Which is very hard to hear, especially when the person you’ve become is inching closer to the person you’ve dreamed of being.
We ran into each other a few times over the years. Their partner looked like another friend of mine. Each time I saw the partner, I thought they were my other friend, so I’d proceed with a smile, ready to greet them, and then, oh. It’s you. No, thanks.
This Instagram message had something I have dreamed of for every broken friendship where I’ve felt I was unheard, abandoned … all those things that poke my deepest bruises.
An apology, my friend taking responsibility for the break in our relationship. No ulterior motives.
I welcomed this friend back into my life. In December they asked if they could participate in the birthday meals. We started at the watering hole that had been our spot, and it was like time had stopped while we got our sloppy selves together and both learned how to be better friends and better people.
Yep, things are still good. And I’m so happy not just to have this friend back in my life, but to have a dark memory pretty much erased. Given a happy ending. One less era to consider with regret and sadness. We could all use fewer of those.
The meals included a lot of friends I had in the limbo of having once been close but having grown apart. That includes a childhood friend I hadn’t seen since the night we graduated high school in 1991. We spent three hours catching up over barbeque in Kansas City. Lots of people I hadn‘t seen in person or even talked to much in recent years. Pandemic, surgeries, 21st century hellscape … it all gets in the way. Unless you take all those things out of the way. Which is kind of scary, tinkering with The Way Things Are Supposed to Be and trying to turn them into the way I want things to be. In that version, my assessment of every person I’ve met has been correct and wonderful. I’ve never done anything stupid to piss anyone off. And we’re all friends who go out for ice cream and whiskey drinks every night.
That’s not reality. But I think it might be closer to reality than I realized.
The day I made my last Substack post, I poked around the back end, where I saw the list of email addresses of subscribers (you know you can subscribe and get this shit in your inbox, right? There’s a button at the bottom). The most recent subscriber a few weeks earlier had a name in the email address I hadn’t seen in a decade. The tenth anniversary of a day we’d spent at their house—dipping feet in the pool, eating handmade foccacia, and wrapping our heads around the unexpected death that morning of an iconic St. Louis musician and photographer—had passed a few days prior, so they’d been on my mind.
They were on my mind a lot, really. Mostly because this was a person I really liked, bonding over sushi lunches and seismic life changes I’d recently undergone—the ones that led to my other friend not liking me for a time—that they were about to experience. I felt like I’d spent a lot of time doing the emotional labor of helping them through this change, but six months or so after it all started, they went quiet.
If you read my last post, you might recall that I mentioned having been ghosted by someone recently. I still don’t handle it well, but maybe a tiny bit better than I did a decade ago. That old ghosting was one thing in a string of growing pain-induced changes in relationships, career, self-perception, and oh, did I mention it was 2014 and I spent most of the year in a depressive episode unlike anything I have experienced before or since?
2014 taught me a new level of self-reliance—it was the beginning of learning how to be my own friend, my own partner, my own love of my life. I’m not there yet on any count, but I’m a hell of a lot closer than I was a decade ago.
A decade ago I never would have put out a call like the call to birthday meals that laid me vulnerable to rejection. It would have been fraught with panic over who hadn’t responded, who ignored it, who just didn’t join in for whatever reason that likely had little to do with me. Or had everything to do with me and should serve as a footnote that maybe this isn’t one of my people. No anger or fear. Just an absence that would quickly be filled in a better way by someone else. Not replaced, just a better fit.
I saw the person who subscribed about a year after I last heard from them. We were at the same cafe, sitting at tables facing each other, for about an hour. I seethed the whole time, both willing them to acknowledge me, apologize, let me be right, and hoping like hell they had put me so far out of mind to not recognize me. These desires fought it out and everyone lost when I got up to leave, but instead marched over to their table, proceeding to publically snarl in all my injured wild beast hurt that had percolated all those months to a flash of heat and venom.
I have never forgotten the look on their face when I approached the table. It wasn’t fear or panic. I was greeted with a genuine smile, and the sparkling eyes of someone who, in the millisecond flash of recognition, was happy to see me.
Regardless, I yelled, and I left. And that was the end of it.
Except like the other friend, this person never left my mind. When I was in their neighborhood it was always in the back of my mind that I might see them again. And it would be their time to yell.
I didn’t expect that to happen in the dashboard of my damn blog. But there was the name.
It takes a long time, maybe a lifetime, to move beyond the habits we start building the moment we’re born, to protect ourselves. That’s evolution—we’re supposed to keep the habits that keep us alive and uninjured. Evolution didn’t account for us developing the skills to regret, to miss, though. One of my protective habits has always been walking away. Don’t stick around for the criticism, don’t fight, just go when the habitat becomes inhospitable.
That first friendship ended when I noticed the person had unfriended me on Facebook. Instead of leaving it at that, taking it as a sign that of course I didn’t deserve friendship, I did something new to me: I fought. I texted the person and asked what was happening even though I knew the answer might tear me apart. And it did. When I didn’t agree with their assessment, I said so, defending myself instead of just turning around and going.
But it didn’t kill me. I lived to have awkward run-ins with this person, stumbling over my hurt feelings and self-righteousness, catching my own fall, moving on until they showed up in my inbox.
I think that’s why I decided to show up in the second friend’s inbox with an email that said, “Do I know you?”
I knew the answer.
And we talked, exchanging a flurry of emails with life updates, which turned into texts, which turned into seeing each other for coffee the day before CJ left for college when I was just about as rubbed raw and emotionally electric as I could ever be.
Goddamn, it was so good.
They apologized. I apologized. We’ve both said we’ll likely keep apologizing for a while.
My old protective habits weren’t totally gone. In my mind, the narrative was that they found my Substack and subscribed, knowing I’d see the email address with the somewhat uncommon name that they used as bait for me to bite, reeled into the next phase of our friendship. Which would have been perfectly fine, but, in my mind, still left me reacting to things being done to me.
It took a few weeks before I thought to ask how they found the Substack (google, duh). In the conversation, I learned that they didn’t know if I’d see the email address. It took me six weeks to see it after they subscribed since it’s not something I check very often.
What did they think when they got my email?
“Floorded.”
Not everything is done to trick me. Not everything is a passive attempt at something entirely different than what’s before my face. How many other things in my life have I colored with my own protective narrative that people are passive and there’s intention I don’t see but must protect myself from?
My turn to be floored.
And I am. If someone had told me a year ago that these two people would be back in my life, I would have laughed until I passed out. If someone told me when I last posted here that this friend would be back, and it would be good, I would have really laughed until I actually passed out.
In case I haven’t adequately expressed it yet, I am beyond overjoyed that these people are back in my life. They interrupted my thoughts for a decade many times for a reason. Which has made me consider other friendships that ended a decade ago. There were a lot of social changes from 2012 (the year of the Woody manuscript research) and 2015. The 2014 depression was fueled by many of those losses, seared with rage and helplessness until I was sure I was an unwanted blemish in just about everyone’s life—tolerated, maybe nursed along to calm numbness, leaving relief when I disappeared. I think the odds are pretty low of anyone else from that time also returning with apologies. I’m humbled by the vulnerability these two people have offered me.
When I was standing in a spot where Georgia O’Keefe stood, looking at her mountains, the view so incredible that Georgia never could come close to matching their beauty, no matter how exquisite they were on her canvas. She painted the same mountains, each time changing and morphing into a new view. Darkening but deepening. It’s impossible to capture with words or a paintbrush or even a camera just how red the rocks are.
I can no longer look at people in my past as they were when I was last with them, or pretend to know motivations they never told me. These are the multitudes I keep hearing we have.
Sometimes I wonder if my weird brain and a lifetime of working in trauma has made it so I don't even notice these things with people. I'm so freaking flighty that I just assume I'm friends with lots of people, even if I don't hear from them in 10 years. I have a distorted concept of time. For instance, I was just at your house in St. Ann for a knitting group meet up and CJ was a toddler. That was like a year ago, maybe? Two? NO IT WAS 17 years ago. FFS. I don't know when people are mad at me. I don't know when people flirt with me. When I unmask, I just don't pick up on social clues. I have to be really focused and in "work mode" to do those things. When I'm not at the hospital....I've stopped masking. It's exhausting.
And I'm really sad we didn't get to nail down a birthday dinner. Wanna meet up for a show this fall? I've been really wanting to drive down to Gene's to see Diesel Island play.