Friend as a Verb

A month or so ago, I was told by a man that he would never treat a friend in the way I had behaved toward him. My response was that he should reexamine his idea of friendship; I regarded him as a Facebook  acquaintance to whom I'd offered a job which he then did worse than badly. His sloppy work and the amount he wanted for doing it disgusted me and I wanted no more contact with him. His feeling was that I breached the responsibilities of friendship and thus was an unworthy human being.

I realized after this that my idea of friendship is a stringent one, based upon what surrounded me when I was a child. Friends were people with whom you would share your last meal and who would do the same for you. While you might be very different people, you respected each other's differences and found a common ground in humor, honesty, and a profound respect for labor. Work was what was done to stay alive; it wasn't a disposable occupation and it demanded to be done in the best way possible. A poorly placed log in the construction of a cabin or a carelessly aimed bullet when hunting a moose or a heedlessly brandished chainsaw all had the potential for tragedy. Working for wages brought the money that would keep a family alive through the winter. Jobs of any kind had a certain sacramental quality; one way or another they all meant survival. A friend was someone you trusted to help you get that job done, whom you would help in return. Friendship was a straightforward relationship in those days.

Last week I spent a couple of hours with a man I haven't seen in six or seven years. We only rarely exchanged comments on the internet; we both had a very vague idea of how the other had spent the gap of time that spread between his going-away party and the minute that I let him into my apartment. There wasn't the slightest apprehension that we weren't going to enjoy our visit and I certainly did. I'm 64; he's 33. We became friends quite improbably because we both have a bitter, ironic sense of humor, we each have a gluttonous passion for the printed word, and we respected the jobs that we did to the best of our abilities. That is enough to make this man one of my friends forever.

Another friend whom I truly love ended our initial visit together with a very direct sexual proposition. I declined, we parted amicably, and have been close ever since. Again it's print that is the primary bond between us, along with a delight in the incongruous and unexpected gifts that life offers, and a weakness for painful, unflinching honesty. We live in different corners of the planet now and see each other once or twice a year. We are quite indubitably friends.

The same bookstore that provided me with my 33 year old friend gave me one of my most enduring friendships with a woman so unlike me that we would never have encountered each other under normal circumstances. She is blonde, slender, and beautiful, with a charming, blue-eyed demeanor. I'm short, dark, and intense, with a look of reserve that can be interpreted as prickly indifference. We read the same books, we write because we have to, we both have an almost desperate curiosity about places with which we have no rational connection. We send each other sporadic emails that launch online conversations and then are silent for months on end. We talk on the phone once a year and see each other less frequently than that, but her presence in my life is a constant buttress for me, both in my writing life and in the realm of personal experience.

At a certain point, family members have to observe the same respect and consideration toward each other as friends do, or they drift far apart. I'm lucky. I have a sister who is as honest and as accepting as any of my other friends and I do my best to be the same way toward her. It's difficult sometimes because we bear many of the same scars and we know the dark and dirty corners of each other's history. Friendship between sisters takes more work than other relationships do but in many ways the results are the most rewarding. I have three sisters and I believe that one out of three is a good ratio. I'm grateful that my youngest sister and I have come through a rough patch to become friends.

Facebook has made "friend" into a verb but the word is actually a rare gift. Some of my Facebook friends are truly friends, some are very close acquaintances, including people I've yet to meet in real life, many are what I call my imaginary friends, pleasant shadows who glance across my internet life with "likes" and "shares." But my real friends? These are the people whom I rarely encounter at the ADD cocktail party that Facebook has created; we simply don't have to go there.

Traffic

I have a feed that tells me the origins of some of my blog readers. Most of the places are ones attached to faces. Others are strangely comic--I'm sorry, you were looking for real information about buying a sofa or Levis in Bangkok--or sad--no, this isn't really about hearing impaired people in Thailand--or sordid--anything about Bangkok has to be about sex why yes indeed.

One reader began to leave comments and we're now Facebook friends. We may never meet but we look at each other's photographs, leave small messages, share a common passion for travel.  Another is a man with whom I experienced an absurd and debauched period at Tower Books; we rarely see each other but when we do, there's never a gap between us.

And now there's someone showing up from my corner of Alaska--not the town I lived in, but close enough that I wonder who in Homer is coming to Tone Deaf, and why? Perhaps it's someone I used to know; perhaps they will leave a message. And then again maybe we'll just be particles in cyberspace. I like that.

A Suitable Book

When I was small, I envied my mother's ability to float away from us in a book, sitting within reach but oblivious to what went on around her. She never sprawled when she read, always sat upright, often in a wooden rocking chair. Seemingly poised for action, she truly was out of touch. She had tuned us out.

I resented that when I got older. Long before she was able to physically leave us alone, she had perfected the art of going away, while sitting in a chair with a book. Without alcohol or pills, my mother had found a means of escape that was as total as any other drug.

Then I began to feel contempt for that action as I got older. My mother's reading was banal stuff, mysteries and big fat novels. She sent some of them on to me when I married--James Clavell, R.M. Delafield, Trevanian. How could anybody fade away from experience in favor of this bilge, I'd ask myself, still too respectful and fearful to ask her.

"I can stand anything as long as I can read,' she told my sister at the end of her life, and read a book a day until her body agreed to begin its dying. "Is she reading?" is a question I asked over the phone with more urgency than "Is she eating?" I knew my mother could live without food, but never without books. When she stopped reading, I knew she was on her way out.

"I won't know what I'm going to feel when you die until you're dead," I told my mother once. I didn't expect the emptiness that I fell into when she was dead, a weird, hollow feeling that is worse than active grief and that didn't want to go away.

I felt it most often when I thought of books and she would come to mind. I remembered how many hours of how many years I saw her roaming through pages of print, no matter what crisis consumed the rest of her attention. I went to the library and borrowed two fat novels.

Neither of them are books I would naturally gravitate to. They were all plot, all story, written well enough to keep me from wanting to hurl them against a wall. I picked up James Lee Burke one afternoon and read steadily until the book had ended. The next night I read a frothy satire about a family wedding in Maine. I began to feel better; the words were filling up that empty space.

Last night it was Huckleberry Finn. Tonight I'll spend with an old friend, Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy--and that will stay with me for several nights. I'll feel centered by the story and the words and the companionship--and I may turn occasionally from the book to say "Stop reading over my shoulder." My mother will understand. These are words she often said to me.

Where Are You, Johnny?

Before I turned fourteen, my best friend died. I had other friends with whom I had more in common, but only one who was always there when I needed him, whose grin always made me happy, whose common sense outweighed my imagination. Johnny Howard was the first boy I ever knew. In true Anchor Point style, he stayed with us when his mother had to leave town to see a doctor. We fought over the same toys, slept in the same bed. It never occurred to me whether I liked him or not or he me. We belonged to each other in a way that my other friends and I did not. No matter what, I knew we would always be friends.

Then he went swimming in a frigid lake, got a cramp, and drowned. Another friend, another Johnny, was there. He couldn't help. I couldn't believe it. When my mother said she was going to the funeral, I insisted on going with her.

It was an open-casket ceremony. My mother went up. I didn't. She came back shaking with sobs. "That wasn't Johnny," she told my shoulder as she cried. My mother never cried.

I stared at her. Of course it wasn't Johnny. He had no place in this little church where people sang hymns and plastic flowers filled the front of the room. Johnny was outside somewhere, waiting for me, grin exploding in his freckled face, drawling out my name. What was going on here had nothing to do with him at all.

But I couldn't find him, ever again. Now I know that when people say they've "lost" someone, that someone is "gone," they aren't employing euphemisms. Just when I needed him most, as I stopped being a little girl and became something I didn't understand, I lost the boy who would have helped me through all of this. I know somewhere in the woods where we used to play or near the river where he went fishing, Johnny Howard is there. He's waiting for me. I just have to find him.

Rebecca, My Mother, and Me

My parents went camping at Cape Hatteras on their honeymoon, carrying a tent, sleeping bag, and a copy of Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. My father was a man who loved to read but when he discovered that his young bride had brought a rival to his affections, he was a bit miffed. "Of course I brought a book, we were there for a week" my mother explained to me years later, and I was in complete agreement.

Several years after that, when she gave me my own copy of Rebecca, I read and reread it until the glued paperback binding gave way and I had to hold it together with a rubber band.

Much, much later, my mother and I spent a few days together on the Oregon coast. I can't remember what books we took with us, but I was working at Elliott Bay then and I know a stack of arcs would have been part of our baggage. What I do remember is Mother and me sitting on a beach in a patch of winter sunlight, each with our own copy of the Sunday paper, doing the crossword puzzle in companionable silence.

Words were our bond and sometimes our battle line. We read and we talked and we told each other stories all of our lives. Today I feel heavy with the weight of stories, told and untold, those that are still to happen and those that went unspoken.

She was always there, usually at the end of a telephone line. I woke up this morning after a fitful sleep, knowing that April had begun, without my mother. I know it but I still want to write her a note. I guess this is it.

Small World, Big Faces

As I walked toward my Vancouver hotel, huge bronze figures loomed at the end of the street, silhouetted against sky and water. When I began to explore the neighborhood, I went to look closer at the fourteen giant figures, all laughing, all barefoot and bare-chested, all Chinese men.

As I looked at their faces, I knew I’d seen them before. On my final day of my last trip to Hong Kong, there was an outdoor exhibition of bronze statues near the Kowloon waterfront, made by a Mainland sculptor. The faces were the same as the ones I stared at now.

The Vancouver bronze men stood close together, like a little forest. It was hard to tell if their laughter was joyful or jeering, although their bodies were frozen in playful poses. I'd had the same difficulty with the figures I'd seen on another waterfront six months earlier;  I had examined them with a degree of discomfort, unsure if their faces were contorted in laughter or screams.Were these statues done by the same artist as the man whose work was displayed in Kowloon or were they skillful copies of his art?

On my last day, a desk clerk at the Sylvia gave me the artist’s name, and the figures in this Northwestern city were indeed related to the ones I saw in Kowloon. The ones in Morton Park replaced a massive tree that had stood there forever and was blown down in a storm.

Yue Minjun casts his own face in his statues, so the Vancouver bronzes were relatives of the ones in Kowloon. I wandered through the bronze forest, looking at one man’s face, feeling happy to find part of a city I love in a city that I was in love with.

Another Country

It was the mountains that got me. I'm always fascinated by slivers, the spaces between layers of tall buildings, and in Vancouver the slivers often frame part of a mountain range that slaps up against the city's horizon. They aren't ghostly, shimmering, and distant the way mountains are in Seattle. Those suckers are right there, as much a part of Vancouver as any bridge or spire. I'm not often impressed by natural wonders but the chutzpah of building a city as close as possible to a wall of mountains appeals to me.

Then there was the food. A small diner on Seymour Street had a sign that announced they had xiao long bao in the same way that another place might tell the world that they had doughnuts. A spot on Davie Street had desserts--from Transylvania. My walk down Denman Street began with the sight of a large restaurant called Ukrainian Village. Even more than San Francisco, Vancouver is one gigantic "external food cue" as Calvin Trilling says, and it does this with a casual dash. I had the feeling that it wasn't a city of "foodies," but a place where people really like to eat.

I had about thirty hours to spend in Vancouver, and unfortunately eight of those would be spent sleeping. My stomach is adventurous but its capacity is limited. For one of the very first times, I wished I weren't traveling alone. More people would mean more tastes; I've shamelessly used my children that way for decades. As it was, I did my best, beginning with a huge bowl of shio-tonkatsu ramen at Benkei Ramen (soon to leave Robson Street for W. Broadway), and following it up with a cup of Guiness sorbet from a shop on Denman Street, which I ate on a search for a bookstore called Sophia Books on West Hastings.

This is a shop with foreign-language books and magazines, with a concentration on art and design books, and I was eager to browse there--but I couldn't find it. "I think they moved," a barista told me, "There's a big book store right up the street on Pender. That might be the one."

It wasn't. McLeod's is a used bookstore the likes of which I have never seen before--stacks and piles on the floor, shelves crammed to their limits, books tossed into snowdrifts banking the walls. It was appalling and it was enticing and it was almost closing time. "We've been here for forty years," the man behind the counter told me, "The Sophia closed a year or so ago."

I ran my hand across a row of leather bound books that were jammed in with volumes that were decidedly less elegant. "I need a weekend for this place," I admitted with a fair degree of mournfulness and left, mentally examining my budget to discover when my foray into McLeod's could take place.

My hotel was the legendary Sylvia, which is about as close to English Bay as it can be without being on a raft. I sat in the bar, watched the water and people in the park, drank a Red Truck Pale Ale, and made a fatal error. Not to dwell upon such things, but both the oil that had cooked my truffle fries and the mayonnaise that accompanied it was far older than it should have been. On the next day I developed a true fondness for Starbucks and their restrooms, available for the price of an espresso. I drank a lot of espresso in my final hours in Vancouver.

But there are many Starbucks in that city and I walked for hours, discovering that the Punjabi Market has almost disappeared, driven to Surrey by high rents. "But we'll be here for donkey's years," said the young man at All India Sweets who served me a  masala dosa. The woman at Amrit Fashions told me the same thing and I'll go back to buy a box of the sweets that failed to tempt me this time, and to moan softly over the vibrant, glowing colors of Ms. Bunwait's stunning saris.

Vintage clothing shops on South Main, a restaurant called Bob Likes Thai Food, Slickity Jim's Chat and Chow, and Neptoon Records and CDs wait to be explored next time, along with so many neighborhoods that I haven't seen. Vancouver is a city with style and energy. Of course I want to move there, but I'll settle for many trips in the future. I have a goal in mind--to go into McLeod's with a miner's lamp and survival rations for a thorough exploration.

Exploring Wherever We Happen to Be

I come from parents who specialized in large, dramatic gestures. "We're moving to Alaska." "We're camping across country from Alaska to Maine with five children." "We're going to live in Puerto Rico."

With this sort of plan as my template, I've spent most of my life believing that the only cure for boredom was a sweeping change. Settling in always seemed a denial of life and all that it had to offer. But as all people who move quickly and in huge leaps do, I missed a lot in any place I stayed in for a substantial length of time--when I was in the U.S.

When I was in Bangkok, I found delight and wonder in every corner of that city. In Seattle. I ignore the sort of attraction that brings people here on vacation, and leave vast numbers of neighborhoods unexamined. Then one of my sons and his girlfriend gave me a trip to Vancouver B.C. for Christmas.

I've spent the past three months thinking about when to go, where to stay, what to see, what to eat. I leave in two more days and the thought of using my passport for something more than an identification card is almost more excitement than I can stand. But an odd thing happened as I was planning my escape from Seattle; I began to understand that there are pleasures and diversions here that I have ignored since my return from Thailand a year and a half ago.

Today is a picture-perfect spring day and there are hundreds of places in this city where I can spend it. There's a new form of transportation called the Bolt Bus that will get me out of town for a very small sum, and there are trains that will do the same thing for a bit more money. This year I intend to use them, to fill in the gaps between where I've been. Look after you leap may not be the recommended course of action, but it's better than not looking at all.

Postcard from Sisaket

I always have a reason when I go to Sisaket. Although I love this quiet small city that’s only about fifty miles from the Cambodian border, it’s a long train or bus ride from Bangkok. If I simply wanted to restore myself, Korat was much closer and equally pleasant, Sisaket took a bit of planning, but it always continues to lure me back with something exceptional to do.

I’m not a sightseer but I’ll travel to see art. I’d fallen in love with Sisaket thirteen years ago, when I stayed there on a journey to see Khao Prah Viharn, the magnificent temple on a Cambodian mountain. Last October I wanted to go to Wat Lan Khuwit, a temple made entirely of beer bottles. It was in the province of Sisaket, not too far from the city of that same name.

So I packed a bag, got on an early morning train and headed off. The temple was enchanting.  Glass buildings sparkled through the leaves of a forest setting, green and brown bottles the building material for the monks’ cottages, the crematorium, the bathhouses, the ceremonial halls, and the most beautiful of all, the prayer hall that housed the Buddha, surrounded by a fish-filled moat.

The next morning I found breakfast and then went to a temple, wondering why I never allowed myself enough time in this town that always gives me what I want, plus peace and quiet. The night before I’d gone out to explore the night market that sprouted up in late afternoon and ended up at a place called The Cuckoo’s Nest, where expat men of my vintage sat on a porch and drank beer. They were a small United Nations, each of a different nationality, each a long-time resident of Sisaket, and each of them men of few words, but those words were friendly. I looked at them with envy. I wanted to live in Sisaket too.

Now I was leaving in a couple of hours and I wanted to wander a bit. The streets were quiet and the temple dominated the neighborhood, which was fine with me. Thai temples are the country’s social safety net and I make a donation at one in every place I travel to. In return I find an ignorant, blundering form of reverence spring up somewhere within me, not for a being, but for the practice that takes place within temple grounds.

It was early on  a weekend morning and I had almost the entire place to myself. As I walked toward the gates to leave a man in a wheelchair entered. He rolled up toward me, smiled, and greeted me. We began a brief chat, me with my city cynicism waiting for the plea and deciding how much I would give him, while wishing my visit hadn’t ended with a mendicant. The man rummaged about in a small bag that he carried and brought out a package holding two little  mooncakes.

“For your trip back to Bangkok,” he said.

And this, boys and girls, is why I love Sisaket.

Routine is the Silent Killer

Tove Jansson was an artist, both visual and verbal, who is best known for her Moomintroll series for children. I fell in love with The Summer Book years ago, only recently finding a couple of her other novels. Two days ago I bought Fair Play from Elliott Bay's remainder table and discovered this at a time when I needed to read it, advice from a man who is ninety-two to a woman who "is barely seventy."

"...do not tire, never lose interest, never grow indifferent--lose your invaluable curiosity and you let yourself die. It's as simple as that. No?"

My mother is eighty-nine years old, plus five months. Her body is worn out; her mind has not tired. Confined to a bed, she reads a book a day, she chats with my sister, she is delighted to receive mail.

For the entire sixty-four years that I have known her, my mother has been illuminated by her "invaluable curiosity." She has never grown indifferent; she has always been a woman who believes that every day holds a new present, waiting to be discovered.

Through her life, my mother lived at times in rough circumstances; they never defined who she was. No matter what she wore, what house she lived in, what food she put on her table, or how ill she might be, she carried herself with the dignity of a true aristocrat. Her public composure was absolute; her interest in everything that surrounded her was unflagging. She has never stopped looking at the world with the attention and careful observation of a novelist.

I used to lecture my mother on the colors that were most becoming to her, took her shopping to find clothes that made her skin gleam and flattered her figure. She let me do that, but it really didn't matter to her or to anyone else who knew her. She has always been a woman whose exterior is the covering of a bright and beautiful spirit; she still is.

In her final days, my mother has been generous in her gift to her daughters. All of us have been given a chance to see what the end of our lives can be, if we face them with courage and dignity, without whining or "sniveling"--two things my mother always abhorred. But perhaps even greater is the legacy I've only recently begun to appreciate, her gift of "invaluable curiosity," her unflagging interest in life, her deep and inextinguishable love.