A moving experience

What is the stuff of friendship? What are friends for? After Palawan and the next few days that followed, when I went to a seminar and found so many old friends there too, these were points that seemed to beg pondering again. Are we drawn to people like us, who like the same things we like? Or are we attracted by opposites, people so different they challenge and stretch us? Do we have friends because we need them or do we pamper ourselves with their presence?

Because I was afraid of sleeping in my new house alone, I made a reckless promise. I reached out to my one friend who also lived alone and struck a deal: You help me move into my new house and I’ll help you move into yours when it’s time. She understood that I had first-night jitters, knew she would have them too. We struck the deal ignoring that my house is an hour’s drive away by car while hers is a car-plane-tricycle-boat ride away through swamps and seas. These are irrelevant details between friends.

But of course she would also complicate things. This is her nature. She never travels in a straight line unless she is dragged along in chains. Who does that in these civilized times? She can’t just go from here to there. She must pick up people and things along the way. I, on the other hand, like to travel in a straight line, from here to there, no stopping along the way. I would rather take a French leave than do a Filipino goodbye which involved meandering through the crowd and getting snagged here and there. This is also the way I like to communicate with friends, lovers and even strangers. I’ll tell you exactly what I think so we understand each other clearly. This is sometimes perceived as crabbiness. My best male buddy calls me Sue, short for sungit.

She came to see me through my first-night jitters and also to cook a feast for 50 people in my brand-new kitchen whose appliances and utensils were still packed in boxes. One of the glaring differences between us (beyond our height and our complexions) is she has a well-stocked kitchen while mine is spare. In my checkered past I had moved from a huge kitchen to one built for an anorexic. I taught myself to fit into one small cabinet of groceries and even traded down my appliances to what I called "bride size." The big stuff went to my children who were setting up their own homes. This also meant that I stopped cooking elaborate meals. While not a bad cook, I’m not the gourmet chef my friend is. Food is a religion, complete with rites and ritual, to her. I only like to eat.

As we moved into my home, I unpacked while she whipped up paté and exotic pasta sauce for 50 people. She left me what she considered a small stash to sustain me. I was still eating it two months later, after she had flown away to do her thing elsewhere.

A year later, it is her turn to move to her house in the boonies, her turn to have first-night jitters. I brought my gifts – a perverse willingness to scrub all surfaces and sort out boxes. I love setting up homes. Where food is a passion with her, interior decoration is a passion with me. I wanted to create beauty and order, she seemed to flourish in chaos. She thought I was uptight. I knew I was and kept reminding myself that this was her home and she should get her way even if that drove me up the wall. She, on the other, recognized that I was "a valuable resource." Have you seen the ... she would ask. It’s on the ... I would reply. Not that I am that good with my own things, but strangely, I was good at remembering where her things were.

Because I knew I wouldn’t be with her when she returned, I labeled everything I put away. Left closet for household things, right closet for your personal things, can you remember that? Yes, mother, she sniffled. Into the household closet went taped bundles with labels that read bedsheets, hammocks, wind chimes, sunflower lights. Into the personal-things closet went taped bundles labeled: Clothes of Ethnic Provenance, Clothes You Might Want to Wear. I enjoyed doing that, knowing it would freak her out when she discovered it. I meant to amuse her but as the days rolled by, I could see that when she returned without me she would tear through my labeled packages cursing me under her breath.

After she read last week’s column she said, "I realized that all those makers (pasta, popcorn, ice cream, etc) you wrote about are artifacts of a past life that had no place to go so they found their way to Palawan."

"‘Artifacts of a past life.’ That’s a great title for a book," I said, remembering that indeed she had whipped up a four-course gourmet meal on the one working electric burner. Not once did she use her collection of appliances. When we needed hot water for coffee, she took a wide-mouthed big-wicked deep purple designer candle, set it between two unopened cans of mushrooms, precariously balanced little pot with water on the two cans. "Cover it or it will never boil." She did and it did.

We are in the rehashing part of our sojourn. We remember our trip, laugh, ask ourselves and each other what we enjoyed, what we learned. For good times and bad times, that’s what friends are for, goes the song. But there is so much more especially between friends so different from each other. True we share the same universal concerns – home, income, adult children – but our styles and choices are so different. True also we manage to merge our differences now and again. We entertain well together. She cooks and I always set a pretty table. I also willingly do dishes when well-fed. As we argue, we make mental notes: I am like her in this respect but different from her in another respect. We accept these differences without judgment, though we do have pet names for each other. She now likes to call me Sue and I call her Siony (for ilusionada). In discovering and knowing the other better we discover and know ourselves better, deeper. In accepting the other, we accept ourselves more. I can’t help thinking that really that’s what friends are for.

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