Motherload

Summer is as dreadful as ever – it's not that we're not doing nice things, it's that woven into those things come horrible events like having too many friends with cancer at the moment, two with terminal brain cancers. This week I have been an adult. This week I visited my friend who has terminal brain cancer. We wanted to put on a 'play in a day' with her children, mine, and her cousin's, because she and her cousin used to love to do this in their own childhoods. The play eventually ended up as a two-minute iMovie, some kind of insane Arthurian Dance-Off. It was fun, but it was also not at all fun. It is not fun to see children playing, and know that their mother is going to be taken away from them. However much one can dress up the day with costumes, and ice cream, and pasta and iMovie. Yet this is what you do when there are children, because children want to play. They understand what is going on, but they want and need to play. They are full of unquencha...

When I was younger, the phone was a constant companion and source of solace, a lot like eating fistfuls of Lovehearts or Refreshers. I could dial any time of day or night, and willing friends would be at the other end, ready to drop what they were doing to listen to my many woes, empathize, give advice (which I would promptly ignore), and enjoy or endure the high drama of my inner life. My phone bills were probably my biggest expense: I saw them as a painful necessity of life alone. Friendship was the highest state of being: to be connected with another who could understand me meant, literally, the world. I had a lot of friends — it's probably just as well, given what I'm describing. My friends came from distinct groups, parts and times of my life. Sometimes different sets of friends co-existed. I was different people in each of these groups. Sometimes the groups strung out like a pasta necklace over time, knots of friends at different junctures. Some of these groups have fade...