MMy friendships were mostly with people my own age, but when my 85-year-old neighbor left a CD in my mailbox after hearing my young son pounding the drums in the garage, , everything changed. She wrapped the CD with her best handwritten note explaining that she thought you might enjoy the sounds of her friend's band, The Nex.
Other people on our street naturally complained about the constant noise, as the sound reverberated through the walls, creeping into quiet spaces and ruining their daily lives.
But my neighbor didn't. She loved it and would sometimes stand outside the garage door and listen to him belt out the songs as if it were a private concert. She walked the streets most days with her rescued greyhound, who hobbled around in fine leather boots to protect the pads on the soles of her feet.
At the time, we lived on opposite sides of the same street. She lives in a converted lingerie factory apartment, and I live in a rented townhouse. When our townhouse was sold, my kids and I happened to move into an apartment three doors down from the same factory. Now instead of sharing a street, we share a hallway. She was the first person I made friends with in that building.
She's not from here. She received influences from the United States, passing through many countries along the way. She has lived everywhere from Thailand to Ghana, Japan to the New South Wales south coast, gathering friends at each new address. An artist, she has exhibited in galleries around the world, and many of her students are now friends. Sharp, curious, mischievous and thoughtful, she engages in conversation with fun and candor.
We have snippets of conversation as we enter and leave the building at similar times. Sometimes our chats often linger until we're done thinking, meeting in a cafe or outside each other's doors. Lately, we've started exchanging verbose text messages, like conversations that are always speeding up.
One day she told me that she was cleaning death even though she was healthy. Although she is realistic about her age and physical limitations, she aspires to climb the ladder like she once did. We talk about aging and how frustrating it is when your body doesn't do what your mind wants.
She employs my son to help move things and sell online. It's awkward that a 16-year-old is often with adults, but he's not with her. Perhaps her frankness and sincerity elicit the same from him. It's as if she knows exactly how to speak to make him feel like they're equals. She does the same with me.
Although many years apart, we share more than an address. We talk about music and misogyny, the fear of another Trump presidency, climate change, the massacre in Gaza, and how to put solar panels on the roofs of buildings. She is a passionate feminist and explorer of new ideas and ways of thinking. Like many of the activists you see at rallies, she is not young, but she is outspoken, even though she knows that environmental destruction and global unrest do not affect her as much as other generations. They are outspoken, passionate, and in some sense alive to the world. Many people don't.
And, like any good friendship, ours grew to include borrowing books and offering home-cooked meals, as we both walked up and down the hallways in endless transactions. It happened.
Recently she knocked on my door to deliver something and asked in a quiet voice if I was in love. It was such a straightforward question that I laughed. She already knew my history, that my partner had died four years earlier, and that I had been grieving and parenting alone ever since, but she felt something had changed. .
Maybe it's because I started wearing lipstick again, or maybe it's because I stopped wearing the same clothes off the floor and pulled out things that had been sitting in my wardrobe waiting to be rediscovered. They also began swimming in the bay in winter, stepping into the depths of the cold ocean and slowly shocking their bodies back to life. I told her that I wasn't in love, but that we were tentatively dating, and something in me that I thought had gone away when Aidan died reignited. She said she saw all of this in my face, my body, the way I walked down the hall.
We decided that this conversation needed more time than was normally allotted, so we met for coffee early one morning. As we sipped our cups outside in the shade on the street, she asked honest questions and I answered them honestly, enjoying the story. We laughed and exchanged stories of past flings and moments from our previous lives. As we talked, many years had passed since the two of us were just two friends laughing over coffee at 6am.
