Close Encounters

I wrote the following blog post in 2006:

Cathy and I have known each other casually for more than twenty years, but have only been close for about the past five or six. This came about in an unusual way; her close girlfriend  Dagmar had died and God said to me, "Cathy's going to need a friend. You're it." Since God is seldom so forthcoming, I knew not to argue. Besides I already liked Cathy.

We don't see each other one-on-one very often. We don't talk on the phone even once a month. But there's a deep connection there, and we both know it. I realized about a year ago that Cathy's one of my go-to people. In the past year, she's been there for me on matters of tremendous importance, quickly helping me to separate my paranoia from reality.

She is a fine listener, she's nonjudgmental, she's quick to come to clarity and -- perhaps most important -- Cathy has the capacity to hold a viewpoint on a subject that is a polar opposite of mine and allow that to be, without feeling she has to convert me.

I guess the striking thing about the relationship is that we both presume a history that doesn't quite exist. Sure, we were passing acquaintances for many, many years. Then, so suddenly, we realized we meant something to each other, without having to go through the usual exploratory phases of a friendship.

Woody used to talk about circles of relationship and what he said made sense to me. It was about how there are circles of relationship around us and those circles that are closest to us are the smallest and those farthest out are the largest. According to Woody, generally speaking, those in that smallest, most intimate circle are those we've had a relationship with the longest. Those in the outer circles are people we haven't known as long, people who are untested, unproven. Most of the time this is true for me. 

Then there's Cathy, but God put us together and God makes and breaks the rules.

Fast forward fifteen years to 2021:

Cathy and I had a breakfast date this morning. About ten years ago we fell into the pattern of taking each other out to breakfast or lunch to celebrate birthdays. Hers is in October. 

I’ve had a crappy couple of weeks in that a different friendship, a longstanding one, that has been slowly, painfully, and dramatically  fraying over the past three years or so, came to its inevitable end. It wasn’t traumatic for me; it was more of a sad recognition that the fraying was, at last, irreparable. More than once I’ve thought of Rhett’s words, “But, Scarlett, did it ever occur to you that even the most deathless love could wear out?... Mine wore out…"

Today turned out to be a lovely morning. Neither Cathy nor I had any kind of a deadline or subsequent commitment. We slowly cleaned our respective plates and then asked for another pot of coffee. Over our hour and a half together, we solved a handful of world problems and worried together about people we know who are ill. Then, somehow, the conversation quietly and magically turned to our remembering times when we’d been there for each other for all of these years, what a treasure this relationship has been, and ending with a hug and our thanking each other for our friendship. 

I’m reminded of a recent conversation with a different group of women wherein we talked about the widely-held belief that God more-or-less micro-manages our lives, somehow dropping pennies for us to find as evidence of answered prayers, and I opined that I didn’t think this was so, but rather than God gives us the grace to find meaning in all kinds of situations. 

Thank you, God, for joining Cathy and me at breakfast this morning. It was just what I needed.