"I get by with a little help from my friends."

http://journals.aol.com/judithheartsong/newbeginning/entries/1595

This is all you really need to know about me. Without you, I'm less than whole.

I look to my friends for spiritual uplift, advice, companionship, moral support, understanding and grace.

Affection is in the way I'm greeted by my friends and the way Cristy tilts her head and looks at me when I join the gang on her couch.

 Cristy

Friendship is implied in the "flippant" or "sassy" banter between me and the library's branch manager, or in the way the children's librarian always teases me about "paybacks" when I torment her with playful verbal jabs. Friendship is Josh and Joe IMing me at 11 p.m. on a weeknight.

I didn't understand friendship when I was a child. It seemed to me that everyone should always love each other. It was hard to comprehend that people come and go in your life. I thought they all were keepers. I thought we all were family. There was a very wise child that I worked with at a local elementary school who pointed out that the word friend has an "end" in it.

Friendship has been defined as a single soul inhabiting two bodies. I wouldn't go that extreme, but I would say that there is definitely a psycho-spiritual connection between people that draws them together.

Being befriended saved my life. I cannot envision where I might be today if I hadn't been guided by other young lesbians when I left for college at the age of 17. They became my surrogate family. They gave me a reason to keep going. They taught me that I wasn't a freak and that I wasn't alone. They taught me that I didn't have to accomplish everything on my own and also that I was capable of doing much more than I thought I could in the way of self-reliance. They wanted to be there for me. They didn't ask me for anything. They gave me shelter, they fed me, body and soul. They took me with themwhen they ran errands from our woodsy, small town campus into civilization. They loaned me books that filled me with pride in what we were. They gave me the words for the things I felt, the things I wanted, the things I needed. They gave me the word for myself. I'd always felt it, but I didn't know how to say it. Once I learned the words, they helped me learn to say them and claim them as my own. More than kindness and nurturing, simply having them in my life saved my life.

 That's me on the left, on top of a mountain in Maine, checking out the map with Henry, Bruce and Sue Q.  circa 1984 +/-

If you read my journal you know that I am a natural-born brooder.  I believe in chaos theory and negative entropy; that is, that there is order in the universe though it seems disordered and that life drives itself to continue into the future. In spite of myself and the depression I fight, I try to see what there is to be happy about and when I look it is the people in my life, and the natural world, that causes me to respire and fill my heart with more energy to keep pumping.

It is my friends who tell me that they are disgusted by the way I allow my girlfriends to treat me but support my right to make a fool of myself again and again. It is my friends who thank me for writing, thank me for loving them.

When I look at the person I was in college, truth-bending, selfish and anal, I wonder at how they just kept on loving me. I don't know if I would have put up with me.

It was my friends who brought me out of my shell and onto a stage to recite my poetry. It was my friends who taught me to dream with my eyes open and to see without tunnel vision.

It is my friends who continue to teach me how to live and be human. I had a friend, Jennifer, who lived by a sign in her room, "Feed my lambs." She told me, "We are all each other's host and each other's guest." It was Ivan G. at college who told me, "We are all the same."

I find my friends everywhere I look. I have local true blue hang-out friends and chat friends and journal friends and work friends and a lover-friend and customer friends and stranger friends. I had the warmest chat today with a lady I was in line with at an office supply store. I noticed that in her 70s she had the humor to wear a silver medallion inscribed with "What if the hokey-pokey is really what it's all about?" She's my kind of people. I may never see her again but we shared kinship for 10 minutes and it made us both feel good.

It reminds me not only of the Beetles' song from which this essay takes it's title but also of one of the closing scenes of themovie made from one of my favorite books, "Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe" by Fannie Flagg.

In the movie Jessica Tandy, as Virginia "Ninny" Threadgoode, is standing on the main road through Whistle Stop, Alabama. Kathy Bates, as Evelyn Couch, is helping Ninny come to terms with losing her home and telling Ninny that she has a home with Evelyn and her husband.

The story is multi-layered and at it's heart is the value, richness and catharsis of story-telling.

The two women find a fresh jar of honey and a note from Idgie on the Ruth's grave.

((And by the way, if you think Ninny and Idgie are one and the same you really weren't paying attention.))

"Do you know what I think life is about?," says Ninny. "Friends. Best friends."

I go for that.

It reminds me, too, of the recurring theme of the old television series, "Xena, Warrior Princess." 

 

Xena didn't need her friends, except to save her soul from eternal loneliness and damnation. 

Over and over again, it's repeated in the final seasons: "Love is the way."

That's what I'm saying.

"No man is an island,no man stands alone
Each man's joy is joy to me
Each man's grief is my own
We need one another, so I will defend
Each man as my brother
Each man as my friend"