Friends

It seems naïve and a little embarrassing to go on about how a little human affection makes a big difference in the quality of any day. I do pride myself on my sense of self-reliance, but I understand to my bones that no man is an island. As I sit here alone on a Friday evening, the gorgeous, cleansing rain that has brought cool temperatures to this particular spot on the high desert and the birds vocalizing their appreciation outside my balcony door seem somehow not enough. I am simply and miraculously the product of that mystery which lies behind creation. I am somewhat an introvert, sometimes a loner, sometimes gregarious. Like most of us, I like being liked and love being loved. I relish my role as well in those dynamics. Today my share of time and space with others was small—ample conversation, but little connection. This day was mostly about solitary quality.

Although I can be just about as friendly as the next guy, I don’t make friends easily. “Friend” is not a big player in my vocabulary. I have lots of acquaintances, some that I know fairly well, but those who know the best and the worst of me, their numbers are small. Maybe that’s as it should be. A couple of friends, Joy and Judy, are vacationing at their summer place in northern New Mexico right now. Earlier this week I decided on impulse to drive the 70 miles north to Taos, and because their place on the mesa is in the general vicinity, I called from Santa Fe to see if they had plans to be in Taos, which is somewhat a safari-like 45 minute journey from their casa among the chamisa.

You have two choices from their place to Taos. Either way you begin with a buckboard-like ride to the highway, a road that becomes virtually impassable in the aftermath of heavy rains. If you’re a newbie who hasn’t internalized a sense of the trail from highway to house, you might end up visiting someone else, likely an empty house, out on this mesa with an unobstructed view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. From their place, one route to Taos takes you several miles across land down a dirt road before you reach the highway on the north side of Taos, that which takes you across a high bridge with breath-sucking, soles-of-the-feet tingling views of the Rio Grande deep below. The other takes you down in the gorge where flows the Rio Grande and to the highway on the south side of Taos. Either way, the terrain is a little tough or a little scary, and the scenery stunning. “If you come to Taos without coming here, you’ll be sorry,” I’m kindly advised by Joy. From the background, “I’ll kick your butt…” (if you don’t come see us). Now, that’s friendship. Call me to task, even though it likely won’t change my Virgo impulses.

As it turned out, I didn’t make it to the mesa, but I did meet up with Judy and their neighbor Gregg, and we paid a call on friend Jana, who lives in the mountains at Ojo Sarco but was working this day at one of her gigs, situated on the Taos/Santa Fe highway. Jana is a friendship in progress, and even though we haven’t earned our stripes with one another, we have no-holds-barred conversations. Gregg has become a summer buddy. We’re easy with one another. We connect at soul level, but I see him only in the summer. Joy, Judy and I go back 35 years, to when Judy was a high school senior. They are, with no one else in sight, my longest standing friends. Judy drove 175 miles to bring me food, fresh cut flowers and solace the weekend of my mother’s death. We drank too much wine and danced to Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer”, and the next day we took our picture, squinting in the early afternoon sun, before I made the solitary journey to west-west Houston to see my Mother, for the first time, dressed for burial.

Joy has been friend and mother to many. I was a young teacher when we met at the inner city middle school where many of us felt abandoned during the 1972 court order requiring the Dallas schools to integrate. Joy was getting a divorce. I was coming out. I took a long time. Mother, daughter and I became fast friends, and though the years have kept us mostly apart, and at times not in communication with one another, we’ve always reconnected, and it’s always the same, but different, better. Only a month before Mother died early last year, as Joy and I sat in a Ft. Worth parking lot while Judy took care of some business, Joy advised me that I would likely have to make my mother’s journey home a little easier. I pray that I did.

So I am a little lonely this evening. It would be nice, sitting on the mesa after a rain, talking about the ocean of things that friends talk about, reading by flashlight and drifting off to sleep listening to the breath across the room of someone who hugs you soundly on greeting and really wants to know how you’re doing. “I hope you’re happy,” Joy said in an email last winter about my new journey here in the high desert, “or at least content”. Yes, I want to be here, even during the lonely times. Somehow I take comfort, right now, knowing that my friends—those who know my best and my worst—are not so far away.

Friends—Santa Fe, New Mexico (July 11, 2008)

R. Harold Hollis