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.

The Pineapple Man

So, at present, 190 people "follow" this blog. But, I suspect that maybe forty people actually read it. Probably fewer. I'm a bit embarrassed to say how many people I actually believe really read it. I'm not quite that secure in myself yet. I do sometimes wear purple shirts, though.

On Facebook, I have 321 friends. I think we all know that this is no more an accurate representation of how many friends I have in actual, tangible life than the number of followers I can proclaim on Blogger. Friendship is a touchy subject in the Apron household. Mrs. Apron and I are admittedly a bit light in the friendship department. We're both a little socially awkward-- Mrs. Apron claims that I'm much better at compensating for my deficiencies than she, and sometimes I agree. After all, I've never thrown up on anybody at a social gathering, or shouted "NIGGER!" during a theatrical event, and I've thusfar successfully resisted the urge to lick the face of many a comely young waitress when dining out.

While these are all definite pluses in my favor, I still have rather a dearth of friends. A have a couple old ones, and a couple new ones, but that space between is a bit, well, vacant. Because I eschew smalltalk, socializing with coworkers, and being outside of my house in general, I have tended to isolate myself, and I do realize that it is mostly my doing. The friendships that I do have are intense, and sometimes the other party just isn't interested in maintaining such intensity, and I can respect that. We are not a culture of intensity anymore, I don't think. We're pretty flip, pretty cas, pretty, um, superficial at times. And that just is what it is. Most people either willingly adapt, or find themselves forced to do so. I don't know if I've decided which way I'm going to go yet myself.

Funnily enough, what I am finding these days is that the friends I do have are hovering around my parents' age, and a few are a bit older. This is what happens, invariably, when a relatively young person joins, and then becomes president of, a Gilbert & Sullivan society.

I love my old friends. When my wife and I got married four (eeeep!) years ago, a quartet of my G&S friends sang a medley of wedding-related Gilbert & Sullivan songs prior to my wife being walked down the aisle by her parents. "Brightly Dawns the Wedding Day" from "The Mikado", "Hail the Bride of Seventeen Summers" from "Ruddigore", "Comes the Pretty Young Bride" from "The Yeomen of the Guard" set the mood just perfectly, and it let the folks sitting on both sides of the aisles know that this wasn't just any old cookie cutter affair. And the voices of our friends, three out of the four well into their sixties, melded together just beautifully.

Another friendship I have is with a sixty-something-year-old Hawaiian man, with whom I serve on another non-profit board. When I was a teenager, I went to summer camp with his two daughters, but, as life would have it, I lost touch with them and became friends with him. Michael is an engineer and does I.T. things that I don't understand, even when explicitly explained to me by him. Michael is very good at lots of things, but the one thing he isn't very good at is communicating with a human being whose intelligence and ability to comprehend complex verbiage is beneath his own. I once borrowed Michael's van to pick up some huge theatrical spotlights and Michael warned me that one of the sliding doors on the van was "recalcitrant."

"Ah," I said, "you mean 'broken.'"

"Yes," Michael replied, "in layman's terms, I suppose, yes, it's broken."

While Michael often communicates like a computer, he has a heart of pure gold. He builds all the sets for the children's performing arts center where I used to work, just getting reimbursed for materials. His ability to imagine and then create is truly outstanding, and he builds everything in his basement. Knowing and believing that Michael can do anything, Mrs. Apron asked him one day if he could take a look at our antique bed that had an unfortunate habit of collapsing.

He spent all day at our house, even driving to Lowe's to buy wood and bracing materials, and he rigged he fucking hell out of our bed. He explained everything that he was doing, using complex geometrical terms, and I just nodded my head-- pretending I understood what he was going on about. Sometimes, though, I would just cut him off and say, "Just tell me where to hold the wood, Michael."

To thank him for helping save our bed and our marriage, we bought Michael a heavy-duty floor protecting pad for a snowblower that his daughter had bought him for his birthday that he wouldn't stop talking about. He was very touched. When we moved into our house, he had bought us a Ryobi starter kit, complete with saw and screwgun and auxilliary battery. Slowly, I was starting to realize we were friends, rather than Michael just being the dad of two girls I went to camp with many years ago.

So I shouldn't have been surprised when he called me a couple of weeks ago to ask me for a favor. His parents, who are very frail and elderly, had been in deteriorating health for some time. They were living in their native Hawaii until three years ago, no longer able to live independently. Michael and his wife moved them up here, into their basement, which they had completely remodeled, making a full bathroom down there as well as temperature-controlled living and sleeping areas. As their health worsened, Michael began making plans for them to move to an assisted living facility. Michael's father, Jack, served in WWII, making him automatically eligible for a bed at the V. A., when one was available. Jack's wife, Harriet, assisted in the war effort, and, after filing lots of papers and some wrangling, Harriet qualified for veteran's status, and, since there are not nearly as many women as men applying for spots at the V. A. retirement home, Harriet got accepted first.

"I was wondering if you would be able to pick my dad up from the V. A. a couple times on the week of the 18th. My wife and I are out-of-town and he wants to go spend every day with her. I have coverage for the mornings, getting him there, but I need someone to pick him up three days that week. Can you do that?" Michael asked me.

"Of course I can," I said.

And so, on Monday night, I drove to the V. A., arriving at 7:30pm, and found Harriet in her wheelchair next to the nurses' station with Jack standing behind her. They're both small, gray-haired, stooped over, Asian. Michael's wife, Sally, calls them "The Twins."

"Are you his grandson?" the Indian nurse behind the station asked me.

"No," Jack said, "he is my ride. If he doesn't take me, I have to walk 25 miles home." This is very humorous, because Michael told me that his father's limit is "200 yards."

Jack shuffled into Harriet's room to get our her pajamas and her Depends ready for her for the evening. As Jack got her things ready, I stood looking at the Xeroxed family photographs tacked up on the wall. There was Michael and Sally on their wedding day, draped in Hawaiian flowers, Michael's hair was completely black. There were pictures of their daughters and their beaus, pictures of Jack and Harriet in younger days.

"What handsome people," I remarked to Jack, "you're a lucky man."

"Well," he said, opening the closet, "I hope so, anyway." He pulled out several little bags and handed them to me. "Here, we do not eat so much food. All they do is give you food here. Please, take this." Little bags of Herr's potato chips, a chocolate Tastykake, and two small pretzels, formerly soft pretzels, now as hard as bricks.

"Thank you, Jack."

On the way out to the car, Jack missed the curb and pitched forward, and I caught him, my heart almost in my mouth.

"I'm okay," he said. "A very long day."

On the way to Michael's house, he told me all about the jobs that he had held.

"Before the War, I worked for The Pineapple Company, (he didn't specify which one, so I just assumed there only was one in Hawaii at that time, hence the capitalization) and after the war, I work for them again, for a long time. I was an engineer. Then, this Chinese multimillionaire call me and tell me I going to work for him, work on buildings made of pre-stressed concrete.

"This guy made a fortune with a stand selling ice cream on the beach to tourist. Also, he own a lot of property. He buy a Chevrolet/Oldsmobile dealership, and a shopping plaza for $30, $40 a square foot, people say, 'You crazy!' But then, later, he sell it for $80 a square foot. He and I build biggest shopping plaza in Waikiki-- $2.7 million dollar. He build the only revolving restaurant in Waikiki-- it run on a one horsepower motor, unbelievable. Only revolving restaurant in Hawaii. He have a temper. I was a timid man when I first went to work for him. And he say, "Jack, put some balls on." He always call me up and scream at me. Every other word out of his mouth was the F-word. He want me to do some things some way I didn't think was right.

"One day, his son-in-law have a judgment against him, and I went to the lawyer to go clean it up, and he call me there at the lawyer office and say, 'Why the fuck you there without ask me first?' And I say, 'My job is to fix problems, and your son-in-law have a big problem.' And he scream and yell at me-- he was in the hospital all the time-- and I hang up the phone and stand up and say to the lawyer, 'This is the last time you will ever see me here again.' And I went right to the office, he wasn't there, he never there, and I gave the secretary all my master keys.

"I was taught in Catholic school, until college, it was all Catholic. I was taught by the Brothers. They were very strict, and you always know you have to do some things in life to get ahead, but you have to have a code. Some things you just can't do.

He and I still talk, though, that Chinese millionaire. He 94 now. I just sent him a card, actually. No hard feeling."

When we pulled up at Michael's driveway, I walked him up the outside stairs to the house. 3 steps. Jack pitched forward against the outside wall with each step, and I held onto him, gripping his upper arms for all I was worth, more terrified than I'd ever been on any ambulance transport, because this was no patient, this was my friend's father. This was an architectural engineer. This was a WWII veteran. This was the pineapple man.

In the foyer of the house, we shook hands.

"Thank you for bringing me home," Jack said. "It's hard to be away from her. We are married sixty years. I never realized that getting old would be such a... problem."

"I'll see you Thursday, Jack," I croaked, turning away from him, my throat thick.

God save the pineapple man.

Cassette Me Free

The damndest thing happened to me this morning.

I got into my car and started it up, and I looked at the dashboard, maybe for the first time ever, really seeing it. And you know what I realized?

My car has a tape-deck.

This is one of the benefits of owning an almost decade-old car. It's weird, but my 2001 Chrysler PT Cruiser kind of straddles the great, vast divide that separates old cars from new cars. Sure, it's got a dent that's covered in rust and it creaks and groans like a Craftmatic Adjustable bed in the early morning, but it's also got side-impact airbags, traction control.

And a tape-deck. And I know that, but it's something that I don't often think about, or ever think about, really, because I don't keep tapes in my car because who does that in 2010 besides annoying, retro-chic people desperately hanging onto their Tretorns and their Umbros and their pathetic, unctuous youth.

And their puff-paint.

I can remember a year or so ago, reconnecting with an old, forgotten friend of mine who's now a big deal musician on the West Coast, and, when I say that he's a big shit musician, I mean that he's got a Pandora station, just so we all know I'm not resorting to hyperbole. When I picked him up at his parent's house, he was dressed in torn plaid pants, old VANS, a ratty-ass pea-coat and a hat that looked like it belonged to a Depression-era railroad conductor. He climbed into my car, stinking to hell of cloves, smoke, and generalized unwashedness, and he was immediately impressed by two things he saw.

"Holy fuck! Your car has a tape-deck! That is SO COOL!"

My eyes glazed over the car's dashboard and I realized that he was indeed correct.

"Oh, yeah, I guess it does." And then he saw my small, blue emergency light that I activate whenever I stop to help some poor bastard who's run his car into something.

"Holy shit! Are you a fucking cop?!"

"Um, no," I said, "I'm an emergency medical technician."

"Oh-- thank God-- 'cause I've got mad bud in my jacket."

And you know what? Even though I hadn't seen him since I was fourteen, if I had been a cop, I would have arrested him-- just for saying the phrase "mad bud" because, really, who the fuck talks like that?

Even that day spent with my old friend, to whom I have not spoken to since, I never gave any thought at all to my tape-deck. Back in 2003, when my wife and I were first dating, I made mixes for her, like all young lovers of my tender generation did. They didn't, however, include songs by "The Counting Crows" or "Matchbox 20." They were tender, sensitive ballads by folk singers like Stan Rogers, Richard Shindell, Patty Griffin, John Gorka, Lucy Kaplansky and Sinead Lohan.

Interspersed with the sprightly, joyful tunes of Sir Arthur Sullivan, of course-- because, let's face it-- I had to let her know exactly what she was getting into here.

But as the years rolled along, and as the mixes I made for her turned to the CD realm, I slowly forgot that the tape-deck even existed. When we moved into our house in February, my wife found a shitload of old audio cassettes in the closet, put them all in a canvas old-lady shopping bag, and packed them away. And, this morning, for some strange reason, I re-realized that my car had a tape-deck, and I remembered that the cassettes were in the bag in the basement, and I wanted them.

All of a sudden, I wanted them.

And this morning, as I was driving to work, listening to scratchy, dull and sweet recordings of songs I hadn't heard in yers, I thought to myself that nostalgia's a funny thing. And I'm not even sure if that's what I was experiencing. Memories didn't come flooding back to me, and I didn't get all sensitive and sentimental or welled up with tears, even though that is my M.O. I was just enjoying the music, and the ride, and the content way the songs made me feel, like I was getting reacquainted with old friends who notice strange objects in my car-- like a blue light or a tape-deck.

And I was even singing along to these long forgotten about songs, harmonizing, as if no time at all had passed. And I thought to myself, shit-- if only it could be that way with old friends.

It's August 15th

I used to wear a watch that showed the month and the day, but I don't anymore. I'm fickle that way. I've switched to a Bulova wristwatch from the 1940s, which I bought for myself as a present last year for starting a job that only lasted a month, and ended ingloriously. I still wear the Bulova, though.

It has a simple face, with no month or date, so, oftentimes, I don't know what date we're all on-- I'm often on a different one than you. Without that constant reminder, it's easy to lose track.

When I went to the pharmacy to pick up my asthma medication, I glanced down at the signature pad before signing my name and saw that it was August 15th today. I thought for a moment about what was significant about August 15th and nothing specific came to me, though I knew it was something. An hour or so later, I realized it was my best friend's birthday.

But we haven't spoken since May, so it doesn't really matter.

We had a falling out that is inevitable amongst certain types of male friends-- a fight about the other one's girlfriend. It wasn't what you're thinking-- that I wanted to sleep with her or something like that. I just confessed that I didn't trust her, and that, in my best friend's mind, concluded our friendship-- a friendship that began in 4th grade, petered out in high school, and then reignited in college when we discovered that we were living in the same dorm, and had carried on ever since. Until May.

I don't know if he's going to read this post or not, and it doesn't really matter anyway. I wish I could call my friend and wish him a happy birthday, but we all know I'm not going to do that. I want to wish things could go back to the way they were before, but I don't really know which "before" I'd be wishing for, so I just won't. Wishing doesn't get you much these days anyway, I find.

Life without a best friend is strange once you've had one for many years, but you adapt. There is, of course, no replacement for a best friend, just like there is no cure for a broken heart, but the days and nights keep rolling along and we do our little thing in spite of our loss. There isn't really a day that goes by where I don't think about him, at least once. At least fleetingly. In truth, it scares me, though, how ambivalent I've grown about the loss, and it scares me too to think about how ambivalent he has most likely grown as well, as he has adapted and moved on, too.

Thinking back on it, our friendship was probably more volatile and more succeptible to collapse than I realized. We had huge fights and falling outs in the past, and we are both extraordinarily truculent and hot-headed, making apologies hard to come by.

I don't know who was right and who was wrong in our final argument, and I don't care either. Somebody speculated recently that, when his relationship ends he will come back to me, but I don't necessarily want either of those events to occur. I want him to be happy, with or without her, and with or without me.

They say you need friends to survive in this world, but I don't really know if that's true. Maybe they're just nice to have, like leather seats in your car. Part of me can't believe I'm saying that after burying my oldest friend's brother on Thursday, and part of me can. Maybe it's just the depression talking. But, if I were more upbeat, it would probably just be the Xanax talking, and I only treat my asthma.

When this falling out first happened, I thought it was a great tragedy to lose your best friend, but I've come to realize that, while it's still a tragedy, it's not so great. It's just one of those things. What we're so afraid of losing sometimes, I feel, is the history, and all the history is still there, it's just that looking at memories is a little more abstract now. Remembering my past used to be like looking at a Wyeth painting, now it's kind of like looking at a Picasso-- it's still beautiful, but it's also a little fucked up. You have to struggle to look through the weird colors and shapes. It's not so pleasant or so easy to sit back and remember anymore.

Soon it won't be August 15th anymore, and that will be okay with me.

Friendships Like These

"What was the grave like?" she asked me.

I sat there, dumbfounded, fingering the edge of the clear glass coffee mug that sat on the table in front of me.

"Um... I... I don't know."

That was all I could say, or wanted to say. I was afraid of giving too much detail, of saying the wrong thing. Of making her cry. After all, she watched us bury him, from a very far distance, she watched us. I saw her, as I jabbed my shovel into the huge dirt pile, I lifted my head up to clear some sweat from my brow, and I saw her, standing right next to her mother. They were both wearing white shirts and lime green headscarves, and they stood there, in front of all the other women, watching us bury her younger brother.

"Yeah, my mom and I had a big fight about it this morning," she said about her clothes. She had walked into the room this morning dressed in black.

"You can't wear that to the funeral," her mother said to her. This prompted an email that all of us received at 9:00 this morning:

Subject: "Clothes for Today"

Message: "anyone who is coming today please try to wear something white. sorry I didn't tell you this earlier, my mom just told me and now I have nothing to wear."

I, of course, had been dressed in my black suit since 6:30, but had time to run home and change into a white and blue seersucker suit, which had stains on it. Of course, it didn't matter. Nobody was going to be looking at my stains, or me. It was a funeral, for Christ's sake, not a fashion show. And my poor friend, who had a clothing fight with her mom on the day of her brother's funeral, showed up in a plain white t-shirt, with a huge brown stain. What did it matter anyway?

We get hung up on these things, I suppose, because the minutae is easier. It distracts us, it's something else to get involved in besides the tremendous, unbearable pain of losing someone so young, so talented, so intelligent, so genuine. The clothes, the rituals, the food, the driving directions. Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Hindu. Whatever. A loss is a loss, and we are all diminshed.

I did not know him well at all-- I cannot remember the last time I saw him-- maybe at his mother's marriage to his step-father, maybe one time after that. I don't know. I went for his sister, because she has been my friend since 3rd grade. They lived four doors down from my parents' house and we shared a bus stop, back in the days when she would steal my glasses and we would chase each other around the neighborhood. We played in her house and searched in vain for her four escaped hamsters-- all were found when they moved, all were quite dead. I remember playing with her brother, too, the brother I helped bury today. Many many years ago, I borrowed a plastic police constable's helmet from him and it never found its way back to him. I wore it for Halloween a couple years ago when my wife and I went as police constable and prostitute, and were handcuffed together.

His sister and I stayed friends even though she went to a different high school, and we wrote letters to each other when she lived in Abu Dhabi for a little while, back when people wrote letters to each other. It wasn't the closest friendship, and it got less close after she moved to the west coast. It's the kind of friendship where, when she calls me, I pretty much know it's bad news. So, I should have known that, on Sunday afternoon when her name showed up on my cellphone that it was bad news. We had company over, so I didn't pick it up, and she didn't leave a voicemail. Twenty minutes later, she called again, and I knew. I quietly excused myself and texted her from the upstairs bathroom.

"Hey, I can't really talk right now. Are you okay?"

A minute or so went by.

"Yeah im ok. I just wanted to let you know my brother died yesterday. The funeral will be in philly this wk so i can let you know the details if you want to come."

There are friendships like these, and I am just as grateful for her friendship as I am for any other one that I have, because it's just as real and just as important. I don't like going to funerals, and I like actually burying people even less, but this is what it is to love someone and to share a past, and to be the one who's chosen to hold the pocketbook while she goes and hugs distant relatives. The phrase "the guy holding the bag" is often said in a derogatory way, but it can be an honor sometimes, too.

I'm glad today's over. I just wish I'd picked up the phone the first time on Sunday.

"Was it just a big hole?"

"Um, yes," I said, "and there was a wooden frame around it, inside."