Yesterday we got around six inches of snow over four or five hours.  I love watching it come down - something about how it floats and curves through the air that’s comforting.  This morning it covers everything and the view from my deck looks like a Currier and Ives Christmas card.  Later today I’ll have to dig out which will be an hour or so of light exercise, but that’s no big deal.  I need to get off my ass anyway.

Last year we got two feet over a day and a half.  It took two days to dig out from that storm and we went without electricity for a bit over four days.  No heat except the burners on the kitchen stove, but in two pairs of socks, layers of clothes, a sweater, gloves and my watch cap, I survived.  It reminded me of the winter I worked in Manchuria.  My assigned office at the factory had a radiator but at -20F outside, you could see your breath cloud on the air in the room and frost formed on the inside of the windows.

China is another story and eventually I’ll get to that one.  Anyway with no where to go and nothing in particular to do, I checked out the blog and decided to perform an experiment with social media.  Surfing through Open Salon I added a favorite from a blog I liked, and then I checked out the favorites of that blog which led to more favorites.  After a couple of hours, I ended up with ten men and eleven women as favorites.  Today I’m going to message those folks and maybe get some feed back, which isn’t an easy thing for me.  I’ve never been the sort to wave my hands and say pay attention to me.  I have no other blogs, no Facebook page or website.  Over the fifty odd years of my social life, I’ve dealt with over ten thousand people in one way or another, and never counted more than four or five as true friends.

In my experience a true friend is a person with whom you enjoy spending time, and who you trust to unconditionally loan or borrow money to or from without keeping accounts.  A true friend is someone you can call to bail you out of jail and someone who will show up to help you move.  A true friend is a person who has in one way or another helped you save your life.  Friends come and go in the circumstances of life and death, but true friends are usually counted with one hand.

Over the years I’ve lost four true friends through death and the ebb and flow of social attrition but I’m happy to say that I regained one of them.  Right now I’m down to five – my ex-wife and my stepson, who are really family, my crazy Korean American lesbian editor in Colorado, a recording engineer and music producer in LA, and a professor of Jewish studies at the UT Dallas.  I hold three professional clients in high regard: one is a Mexican American executive, the second is an Afghani-American IT guru and the third is a Vietnamese American entrepreneur.  I know that if push comes to shove I could call two of them for an emergency loan or bail.

Robin: My ex-wife, who technically is still my wife - we separated in 1990 but never bothered with divorce - is the CFO of a privately held insurance company in San Francisco.  Though we still love one another, we remain apart because we’re both magnificent boneheads.  We lived together for six years before we married and I must admit that I never fell in love with her.  Instead I fell in love with her library, the photographs of her family and her baby boy.  I met them through a true friend who was my Best Man at our wedding but he has since drifted away – yet another long and painful story.  

During our ten years together we found out who our true friends were.  We moved her damn books – over a thousand of them – from the San Fernando Valley to Venice Beach to my condo in Moorpark to a rental house in Simi Valley.  We separated by degrees when in midlife crisis I slowly slipped away from her in search of my lost passion for life: six months working with the Green Party of California, almost immediately followed by another six months in Taos and then a year in China.  By the time I returned from Taos, Robin had a new job and moved north to Marin, so I called her before I got on the plane to Beijing and told her I wouldn’t have time to deal with the divorce.  I asked her send me the court papers so I could sign and return them to her.  Her reply really didn’t surprise me, “I’ll tell you what, if you ever fall in love with someone and want to marry, you can divorce me and if I decide to marry someone else, I’ll divorce you.”

That was twenty years ago and other than a quit claim deed on the house that she and her son bought, that’s the only legal crap entailed in our state of separation.

Kelton: Thirty years ago when I first saw Kelton, he was naked and riding on the back of an Irish Wolfhound in the front yard of Robin’s ramshackle rental house in Woodland Hills.  At eighteen months he was the perfect picture of an enchanted blonde child laughing in the California sunshine.  Open, innocent and eager to please anyone he encountered, he brought joy and laughter into my life.  I taught him everything I knew: How to read and write and draw, how to use tools, how to catch and throw a baseball and football, how to swing a bat, how to ride a bicycle, how to hike in the woods, how to appreciate and understand music, literature, history and politics, and later, after the separation, how to drive a car.  I even helped coach his Pony League baseball team.  As our years together slipped by we both grew up.  I learned more about life and myself from him than anyone I’ve ever known.  We taught one another as much as we could and when I left him I did everything I could to help him understand that none it was his fault.  We never stopped loving one another and now I have a grandson.

David: I met my oldest true friend in Texas in 1960.  We enjoyed three adolescent years together until we were separated in 1964 with only occasional random contact since.  We always conducted an intermittent correspondence with snail mail and about every five years we managed to visit with one another.  In 1976, David sent me a copy of his dissertation and I replied with an eighty page hand written critique.  During his divorce and child custody battles we exchanged a flurry of letters and phone calls, and after he converted to Judaism, I was a witness to his second marriage.  In 1990 on my midlife search for passion, I spent a weekend with his new family in Oklahoma, but since then we gradually slipped away from one another.

We rediscovered one another in 2007 when Kelton and I prepared for a month long ten thousand mile road trip across the good old USA.  With no particular agenda I wanted to show Kel all of the places and introduce him to the people who’d been part of my life.  Now I wanted Kelton to meet my oldest friend who taught me how to hit a baseball and throw and catch a football, so I Googled David’s name and came up with thirty or forty hits.  He now held the Chair of Jewish Studies at Memphis University.  I called his office number and to my delight and surprise he answered his own phone. 

Kelton and I spent the 4^th of July weekend with David’s family in Memphis and for the first time in seventeen years I had the chance to speak at length with my friend.  We ate Kosher with his family and listened to their stories about visits to Jerusalem and later we drank single malt scotch, smoked good cigars, laughed at the pretence of the correspondence of our youth and, with Kelton, we spent a mellow summer night cruising the clubs on Beale Street.

Clark: After my return from China I lived in a loft building in downtown Los Angeles where he was my neighbor.  Recently separated from his Italian wife and Clark was a bit of a recluse, hiding his pain with whiskey, sex, drugs and rock and roll in his loft on the second floor.  One afternoon I was in the pool playing volley ball with the usual suspects when he came down to check his mail.  With a gregarious slightly drunken invitation he joined us and over our years as neighbors we came to know and appreciate one another.  I watched his little girl grow up and vicariously enjoyed their love for one another.  Through good times and bad, Clark and I shared our appreciation for music, art, good food and wine and over the last twenty years we provided each other with good company, moral support and occasionally helped one another out of financial straits.

A recording engineer and producer, Clark – like a lot of folks in the music industry – has had a rough few years.  His customary six figure income slowly dwindled to the extent that he’s now upside down with his house and studio in Laurel Canyon.  At one point I gave him $1500 so he could pay his utility bills and put some food in the fridge, but over the last eighteen months things have been looking up for him. 

On New Year’s Eve in 2010 I got a call from him and his new fiancé, Tina, with a very strange request.  Over their lamb and wine they’d been discussing wedding plans when Tina decided that she wanted me to conduct their wedding ceremony.  When Clark asked me, if I’d do that for them, I laughed and asked, “Does she really know who she’s asking for?”

He laughed and put her on the phone.  I spent a half hour trying to dissuade her, but she insisted that since I was one of Clark's true friends that it was only appropriate.  Besides, she confessed, “I’m in love with the sound of your voice.”

Two days later I purchased a certificate as a Minister of The Universal Life Church on line, and in September, I drove up to Napa Valley to preside over their wedding vows – yet another long story for another time.

Lil' Bear: I saved one of the best for last: the first time I met her, she asked me to sign away my soul.  Dressed in a black corset, fishnet nylons and high heels offset by her shiny shaved head, Lil' Bear was playing the role of Satanic hostess at the Halloween performance of an LA theater ensemble known as The Zoo Company.  I’d seen one of their productions and when Clark asked if I had any plans for Halloween, I suggested that we go see the Zoo.  Confronted by Lil' Bear I laughed and said, “Okay but I’ll be needing a kiss with this screw.”

“Sign here,” she replied.  I scrawled some bizarre pseudonym with my left hand and she leaned over the table to kiss me.  I laughed again, “I didn’t sign my real name.”

She chuckled and said, “Doesn’t matter the deal’s been sealed with the kiss.”

“But I’m right handed,” I protested, to which she replied, “I’m a lesbian and now you’re in love with me, so it still doesn’t matter.  I got your soul.”

Of course she was right.  I became a long time fan of the Zoo Company and Lil' Bear and I became fast friends.  Barely five feet tall, tattooed, dressed in jeans, wife beater t-shirts, black work boots, and a motor cycle jacket, she was a libertarian, alcoholic lesbian bottom, full of shit and bad manners evolved from the adopted Korean orphan toddler who’d grown up in Alabama and Iowa as a stranger in a strange land. 

About six months after we met I heard she was out of work and couch surfing through her friends.  I’d signed on to produce my second play with the Wolfskill Theater but since I was working full time at a company in Orange County I didn’t have the time to direct the play or deal with all the details involved with mounting the production.  I needed help which, oddly enough, dovetailed into an old Karmic debt I owed to the memory of another true friend – yet another story that can wait to be told.

I called Lil' Bear and over whiskey and cigarettes we came to an agreement… she and I would co-direct and she would double as an assistant producer.  I would pay her $3000 which would get her on her feet financially and until she found a place, she could crash at my loft. 

We worked well together, and she became my de facto editor - calling me out on my bullshit as I rewrote the play.  After the run of the production, I introduced her to a male artist friend who was back in LA and looking for a space.  It worked out and for the next year they shared the rent on the loft next door to me.  The three of us drank together, discussed our common problems of understanding women, sometimes worked together, and occasionally cruised up the block to the topless club, where I relished buying lap dances for her.

I threw a birthday party for her that celebrated her particular fetishes: Rockabilly fashion and strict prim women librarians.  Over one hundred guests attended in costume and the festivities lasted from three in the afternoon until dawn the next day. 

My crowning achievement with Lil' Bear was the fact that I introduced her to the woman who now shares her life.  It was at a wrap party for a production of the Zoo Company and unbeknownst to me it was love at first sight.  A month or so later she and I were having lunch and when I asked if anything had developed from their encounter, her cell phone rang and she started to laugh out loud.  “It’s Manika,” she said, and after they spoke, she laughed again, “She just signed the lease on a guesthouse in Silverlake.  We’re moving in together.”

“Oh my God,” I replied in genuine surprise, “Suddenly I feel like a Jewish mother!”

Lil' Bear eventually cleaned up her act and today she and Manika live with their goofy little dog in Boulder, Colorado.  She’s still full of shit and bad manners, but things have worked out for her and that makes me smile.

except for attributed photos and text all content is copyrighted  © 2012 JKM