I heard from an old friend today. Not via email, or voicemail, or textmail… I got an actual card in an envelope with postage. It seems she’s laid up after a foot operation and is convalescing at her parents’ house, and is feeling lonely and out of touch. I was talking about this tonight over dinner with David and Steve – we got together for some good old fashioned American comfort food at the Olive Garden (yes, yes, primitive irony). In a few minutes, I’m actually going to sit down and write a letter to her (or maybe I’d better type, my handwriting isn’t the best).
My friend doesn’t have access to email, and in fact at the best of times had somewhat limited ways to communicate with people after she married some years ago. She had been unable to keep her job after marrying due to complications with her commute (it involves a ferry and a long drive in all
weather, and she’s not a ferrying and bad-weather drivin’ kinda gal). So for several years post-marriage she’s been kind of stuck on the end of an island peninsula in Washington State, unable to get to Seattle for culture, unable to visit family or friends without having to deal with her ferry problem or depend on somebody else, and increasingly isolated and out of touch from everything familiar. Her husband goes along with her need to be with her family every few weeks, and her dependency on him for getting her out of the house.
I’ve been concerned about her for a while, but she didn’t seem to be crying out for help or human contact until now. Her husband cares about her, but they have a strange kind of marriage – before her surgery she spent at least two weekends a month staying with her parents, on doctor’s orders (this was to help her deal with some of the coping/anxiety issues). I don’t know if they still were doing that in the last few years, but she’s definitely at her parents now, in a wheelchair and off her feet until at least May. I don’t really know why she’s not at home on the island, other than she’d be alone all day with her husband at work. She used to complain about the remoteness of life out there because everything interesting was too far away – to me, it seemed like a lovely haven, but not everyone is set up to essentially live in a large beach cottage year-round, rather than just on weekends (I know I would be, if only there were broadband or DSL internet access and digital cable).
She emailed me occasionally, but it bothered me somewhat that she was using a freebie account of her husband’s, rather than taking 5 minutes to create a freebie account of her own using Yahoo or something. I mean, her husband could read her personal email, so I didn’t exactly want to email her and say “so, how are things really?” So I didn’t email – she preferred talking on the phone,
anyway. It struck me as in character, yet still odd, that she wouldn’t or couldn’t take steps to have her own email identity, but then I’ve been online for 10 years now, and she always treated it as a bizarre novelty.
She writes cards and letters more frequently than she calls, and I haven’t been very good about replying, or very prompt either, but tonight I will. She sounds really down. And besides which, I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately, for the silliest reason – she’s a HUGE Kerry fan, and is probably dying to vote for him. This Kerry thing of hers has been going on for a decade or more. In fact, I wondered if she’d gotten involved with the campaign, but that seems very unlikely now.
She wants to hear all about my life; what I’m doing, any trips I’ve taken, what’s going on with my family, how my job is going. With sinking heart, I realize that I can’t really just direct her here – she’s got no access. So that easy answer is out. Which means I’ve got to write a letter. Got to get the letters to form words. Sentences. Stuff I’ve already covered, too.
Oh… wait. Copy and paste… no, no, that’s not the action of a friend. Too easy.
In fact, I think I’d better go upstairs and handwrite this one, because if I sit down here in the Black Hole of Computers, I’ll get distracted and never get it done.
But dang. It would be so handy to email or IM her and say “well hi! Lookit here – this is my life. Now what’s going on with yours?”