Thoughts on Friendship
“Perhaps a best friend is someone who...holds the story of your life in mind. Sometimes in music a melodic line is so beautiful the notes feel inevitable; you can anticipate the next note through a long rest. Maybe that is friendship. A best friend holds your story in mind so notes don’t have to be reopened.” —Rules for Visiting by Jessica Francis Kane
In Rules for Visiting, Jessica Francis Kane tells the story of May Attaway, a fortyish single woman who has made a quiet life in the town and home where she grew up, working as a botanist at the local university. Plants and trees and flowers are how she makes sense of the world and tries to reconcile herself to it, especially in the wreckage of her family.
But after she is given an unexpected gift--an extra month’s vacation from work--May decides to use her free time to slip out of her solitary life and visit her four old friends, scattered all over the world. Her journey helps her decide what it is to make and to have friends and how to begin to be a friend to her own life again.
I wasn’t sure about this book at first. I know nothing about landscaping (my poor yard can attest to that), and there are such artful descriptions here of plants and how things grow. But these descriptions were quiet nudges into the heart of the story, and they were beautifully written. I also really loved the parallel between May’s journey and Homer’s Odyssey, especially the way Penelope waits for Odysseus. May also references the story of Beowulf, an ancient tale I have always enjoyed, and she names her suitcase after the lonely monster with no friends.
It’s hard to keep up with old friends into adulthood, and it’s even harder to make new ones. When my husband and I moved back to my hometown after several years of marriage, most of our closest friends were no longer nearby. Many were at the start of building families and careers; Joe and I were both starting new jobs, and keeping in touch was difficult. Because we chose not to live in town, we had to redefine what it meant to make friends and to be friends when, for the first time in our lives, having friends wasn’t as simple as running to the gym together or grabbing coffee after work.
Honestly, we didn’t always do that great a job of it.
My favorite show was FRIENDS, which is a hilarious portrait of one kind of friendship, one that for years I thought was the best kind. I thought we needed open doors and people in and out all the time, despite the fact that Joe and I are both deep introverts who can’t function without some quiet time to recharge. Because I didn’t really understand or accept who I was, I didn’t always know how to be a good friend to others.
My attempts at recognition and acceptance of myself and what I need are reasons I connected to Rules for Visiting. We all mess up sometimes, but it doesn’t mean we stop reaching out or stop trying to find our place in community. May thinks about the idea of settling as being nestling down to stay and says, “I suppose what you are reading is my attempt to settle. There’s a story I’ve been trying to tell, one about friendship and friends and what place they have in a life, and one I’ve been trying to tell about my family. Does that make me an unreliable narrator? To a certain extent, aren’t we all? We don’t get to write from scratch the whole story of our lives. We are given certain plot points that must be incorporated. Maybe we settle when we’ve done the best we can.”
Despite all the changes over the years and the mistakes I’ve made, I love the friends I’ve made throughout my whole life. Looking at friendship as May does helps me to realize that knowing and learning from them has been and continues to be a chief joy, and I love every chance we get to be together, or send a message, or laugh over FaceTime.
Now when I think about friendship, I think less about orange couches and endless coffee and more about these lines from May:
“Two people, side by side, looking straight ahead.”
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