**In 1 week I will be 50 years old**Today my Old Friend is 50 years old. We move through our lives together, but she goes first, by a week. In honor of her wonderful soul, a diary entry.
We were 8 years old when I moved into the house across the street from her, into a neat little suburb with 1950s tract houses and a school around the corner. We found out right away that our birthdays were just one week apart and we were the same age. The weird thing was, she was a year ahead of me in school. Our January birthdays made me the oldest in my grade, and her the youngest in hers. Her mother had sent her to private kindergarten so that she could start school a year earlier. My mother had been advised against that, since I wasn�t the most mature little kid in the world. As it turned out, neither was O.F., a fact that her mother either didn�t know or didn�t get, or most likely, didn�t care about.
She was gentle and sweet then, although she had a terrible temper when provoked. She was a little chunky, and strong, and so she could do damage when she was mad. Her mother, who lost her temper at the drop of a hat, would throw china and break it. I saw her do it all the time.
Life has not been kind to Old Friend in many ways, and most of them are spelled M-O-T-H-E-R. Now that Mrs. O (the mother) is old, she wrings her hands and worries about her daughter and says she loves her. Too little too late. She was known to leave the house when O.F. cried as a baby since she didn�t like the noise or little children (she loves to tell this story), and went out of her way to make sure that both grandmothers never got too close to her. Her older son from a previous marriage was the kind of kid who tortured cats and scared the hell out of his little sister. (He�s a surgeon now.) One of the totally weirdest things Mrs. O would do to O.F. was this: when she had to get dressed up to go out, and wanted the kid�s page-boy haircut to look nice, she would wet the kid�s hair, and then clip it over a sanitary napkin that was wrapped around the back of her neck. This was before the stick-on kind, so they had long flat tabs that stuck out on either end; the kid had these pointing up at her temples, like horns. Then her mother would send her out to play until her hair dried.
Then, the summer between her junior and senior year of high school, O.F.�s parents sent her on a wonderful trip to France. For Mrs. O, it got rid of the kid for a couple of months. For O.F., she learned to smoke grass. A lot. For Mr. O, a lovely gentle man who worked too hard, he never got to see his kid again. He died of a massive stroke three days before she came home.
O.F. is overweight, diabetic, has a very bad back and awful eyesight. She is a lesbian, which means she doesn�t have good relationships with women, either. She has never had a partner, male or female, who hasn�t found some way to take advantage of her.
She doesn�t work, she can�t work. She is on disability. She is emotionally incapable of working the regular hours of a job; doing so worsens her physical conditions and sends her diabetes spinning out of control. She doesn�t have enough money for all the medications she needs to take or the psychiatrists she needs to see. Although she�s been in therapy for many years, she still has almost no memory at all of her life before she was 18 or 19. She remembers brief bursts (like her mother slapping her in the face in front of a roomful of people) and vaguely, remembers her father. If she needs to discuss particular events with her therapist, I have to remember them for her, because I remember everything.
Now. She is depressed, generally, but she remains pure and good and loving, all the time. A light shines from her soul, a light of love and reaching out. She has few friends, and those she has would do absolutely anything for her, and do. They carry her packages upstairs, they weatherstrip her windows. They take her cat to the vet. I don�t see her often � although she lives in the city, only 10 miles away, I�m a little city-phobic, won�t drive there, and make my annual PATH train-subway trek each summer. Public transportation is hard for her, because of her size (I�d guess around 300 pounds.)
She lives in a studio apartment in Greenwich Village, in New York City. It is charming and old and rent-controlled, so she can afford to be there. Her neighbors are also good to her. Walking around the streets with her, it�s like you�re in Mayberry with Sheriff Andy. She knows everyone (and every dog) by name, and they know her. She carries treats for the dogs in her pocket.
We stop by her friend Stephen�s antique shop. She works there for him when he goes away, or some days just keeps him company. She was born to work in a store, and she�s good at it. It was what her father did, and his father before him.
O.F. went to F.I.T. back in the 1970s; that�s the State University of New York�s Fashion Institute of Technology. She runs into old classmates all the time who still live in the Village, too. Her best friend and later roommate from F.I.T., Jerry, died of AIDS in the mid-80s, as did so many of her classmates, neighbors, and friends back then. So she lived through that horror, too.
When she sees you, she smiles. We talk on the phone for about an hour each week, and now that she�s on a new medication for depression, she sounds happy. She deserves to be happy. There are plenty of bad people who get to be happy, and she�s not bad. She�s the best.
I�ll call her in a few hours, when I know she�s up, and sing Happy Birthday to her. Her mother�s driving into the city so they can have brunch.
Happy Birthday, Old Friend. We love you.
