Heymish

I never set out to make friends by becoming a blogger.

The very idea, had it been presented to me when I began this wayward little adventure, I think I would have disregarded as daft, and a little bit mad. The notion of sending out random, disconnected shards of oneself into the great beyond, anonymously at that, to return and forge friendships with complete and total strangers would never have even occured to me.

Of course, this is exactly what happened.

Of course, it had never occured to me that it was, in point of fact, the randomness of IP addresses, screennames and avatars that snagged me the girl who was to become my wife-- a chance online meeting on February 16th, 2003.

That should have warned me that the possibility of e-motional connection was, well, possible.

I have been incredibly lucky, I think, with, well, you. The people who have, for whatever reason, been drawn to this blog are... heymish. It's a Yiddish word, meaning "to feel at home with." Comfortable. Cozy.

Yeah, I'm talking to you. You're heymish. Deal with it.

That's what Paige said to me after she'd friended me on Facebook.

"I found you," the Facebook email accompanying the Friend Request read, "deal with it."

We'd been emailing for a while, back and forth. Supporting each other through transitions and scary times and just for fun. After some hardcore sleuthing, she'd figured out my full name. What a punk, right? A while later, in September of 2010, after I'd started my job at the psych hospital, a card arrived in the mail from an unfamiliar zipcode. In it, was a handwritten message wishing me good luck in "Zombieland," an affectionate moniker for my new place of employ. Attached to the card was a tangible good wish, too-- a bay leaf. She'd figured out my mailing address, too. My shoe size still remains a secret from her.

I think.

In May of 2009, my best friend stopped speaking to me after I called into question his relationship with the woman who has since become his wife. We met in the fourth grade and, in college, we were the other's shadow. We loved each other very very much, and we tried to be brothers and, for a while-- it worked. Then one day, it stopped. Paige came onto the scene, with her wit and her charm and sense of humor and supportive ear right around the same time, and she lifted me up-- and continues to do so, with a check-in email here, an insightful, knowing blog comment or a lately too-infrequent IM conversation there. A Facebook "Like." I've gotten her angry, and she's done the same for me. Sometimes, life comes at her and I don't know what to say. And that's okay. We're not trying to be brother and sister, or friends from elementary school, or even socially compatible, because we're none of those things. It's good to have a friend like that again, and the fact that we don't do lunch together or take drives, philosophizing in the car as I used to do with my this-zipcode-friends doesn't seem to matter much to either of us.

Paige responded to a blog post of mine a long time ago with, "Pssst-- I want to be your friend." Pax was not so overt. Or maybe he was moreso.

A Mason, Pax has e-settings that send posts and webbage with the words "mason" and "masonic" to his inbox. He read for a while before sending me an email, letting me know that he never has done something like this before, telling me how much he enjoyed the blog, (even though it has absolutely nothing to do with Masons) and how he believed that we could be friends. He was right. We sent some pretty perverse emails back and forth to each other. We both have an ardent appreciation for lesser-loved Monty Python material (our favorite full-length film is "The Meaning of Life"-- after all, it's only wah-fer theen!) and found that we could keep pace with the other's dubiously functioning mind. Pax contacted me to let me know that he couldn't access the archive, with over 700 posts of My Masonic Horseshit contained therein and to tell me how frustrated he was that he couldn't read the history of this out-of-control... thing. I told him how to go back to the beginning.

"I'm going to do it tomorrow, while I'm on conference calls all day." I wrote back and asked if he'd be wearing pants. He said probably not.

One day, a little while ago, Pax emailed me to ask for my address (or the address of someone who could get something to me). I was tempted to tell him to write to Paige to ask her how she found it, but I gave it to him. Me, a four-star paranoiac-- I gave it to him. Because I trusted him. More than that: I like presents.

What came to my doorstep a few days ago made my heart swell.

"A Treasury of Gilbert & Sullivan: The words and the music of one hundred and two songs from eleven operettas." Copyright, 1941. Hardcover. Beautifully bound. Lavishly illustrated. It is the crown jewel of my G&Sery, and it has many competitors for the title, of that you may be sure. It is one of the most beautiful, meaningful books I own, and one of the most special gifts I have ever received. And he doesn't even want a thank-you gift. That doesn't mean, of course, that he isn't going to get one. Or, I don't know. Maybe this is it.


I'm a big whiner sometimes, I know that. Everyone loves to complain about how hard life is and how this sucks or that sucks and how they don't have any friends, and, that part is kind of true, on paper at least, the amount of friends I have in my life are far fewer than the amount I had ten years ago. But for whom I have, and for how I have them, I am extremely grateful. The cover of the card from Paige features a whimsical drawing of a plant onto which grow funny-looking folks, growing on the plant with their legs attached to the vine, and it reads,

"Manypeeplia Upsidownia"

And that's exactly the kind of people I want in my life-- the upsidownia kind. Just as long as they're a little bit heymish, too.