Current mood:

thankful

I Want to be Like Her
I'm glad to have this opportunity to tell you about one of my best friends, but it is difficult to know where to start. We met via email and a free voicemail service available in the late '90's, and I liked her immediately. Up until the time I met her, the bulk of my friendships were "rescues." They were people whom I liked and/or felt sorry for. I felt at the time that if I just did enough, tried hard enough, I could make their lives better, but this was not the case with her. There was just a simple spark of friendship. We are different in so many ways. I live in Pennsylvania, where it seems like winter lasts six months out of the year. She lives in Louisiana, where a really cold night gets into the 40's. I mostly wear dresses and skirts, while my jeans-wearing friend doesn't own a single one. I usually avoid any kind of profanity, but she is most definitely, um... colorful! But for every area in which we're different, I can name two or three in which we're very much alike. We both love to laugh, and the more immature the subject matter. Bodily humor is funny, and dog bodily humor can bring us to the point of hysterics. We both love to read and seem to have a need to hoard books. I think it was years of only having access to a few bulky braille books at a time. Now, countless books can be stored on a single memory card, so we can hoard to our hearts' content without having to build separate libraries for the purpose. We both love coke and many other wonderful goodies not found on anyone's top ten list of healthy foods, and we both trained our guide/service dogs ourselves.
There are times I feel like her "rescue," because I have learned and continue to learn so much from her. I was devastated when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and she, her husband, and their four dogs had to evacuate. They ended up starting over in a strange city, living there for about nine months, and anxiously waiting for the day that they could go back home. I think I'd have just gone into mourning and never come out. She did go into mourning, but she definitely kept on living. She studied to become an herbalist, made friends, and went on with her life. I learned from watching her that there's a time to be stoic, but there's also a time to hold a grand-scale pity party and invite your friends. It's good therapy, and helps you make it through the rest of the 99 percent of that time where a stiff upper lip is a requirement. She never seemed to loose sight of where she wanted to be. To me, she is living proof that we all really do need our dreams to keep us going.
She's back home in New Orleans now, and I wish I could say all is sunny, but that's not the case. Life keeps throwing her curves, and she handles them with infinitely more grace than I believe I could. One of the things that has changed since her return to, as she calls it, "The Big Moldy," is her hearing. She was already profoundly Deaf in one ear, and the mold present after Katrina caused the progressive hearing loss in her other ear to worsen noticeably. I remember when she sent out an email to friends giving the number of a local relay service for the Deaf and re-stating her instant messaging information. When I read that her time on the phone would have to be drastically cut back because it was too hard for her to understand conversations, even with a hearing aid, I was devastated! In my mind, messaging and emailing were fine, but there was no substitute for picking up the phone for a spontaneous gabfest. I finally came to realize that my feelings of loss weren't even really for her, but for me. Sure, I was upset that she was going Deaf, but in my mind, it was all about ME; how I would feel, how it would change MY life. HOW SELFISH! After conducting a rather painful attitude adjustment, I realized it had to be even harder for her. After all, she would have to communicate without the phone to everyone she knew. I decided then and there that if she could deal with it and not throw a tantrum because her life was changing, I could at least do the same.
I have read the results of numerous studies stating that the biggest fear of the "average person" is going blind. I have no way to substantiate my claim, but I would imagine that the biggest fear among blind people is loosing their hearing. When my friend continued loosing her hearing, when she couldn't hear the sounds her dogs made when playing, or her favorite Christmas music, I felt sad for her and afraid for myself. I wondered how I would fare in her place. She's fared quite well, thanks very much. It hasn't always been easy, and sometimes the biggest obstacles are the attitudes of others. What used to terrify me has been relegated to the "traumatic but not the end of the world" category. I've seen her keep pushing, keep trying, and by watching, I believe that if faced with a similar situation, I could do the same.
She's zany, and witty, and funny, and passionate, and kind, and irrppressible... and when I grow up... I'd like to be just like her. And now that I've finished writing these words which will likely embarrass her, it's time for the real tribute. It's time to plant a whoopie cushion under someone's chair, forward a really tactless email message (probably to her), read a good book, eat some cheese puffs, and raise my glass of coke to my friend, pawpower4me!

This entry was written for pawpower4me, of course, but also for this week's round of therealljidol. My new partnerthis week is the amazing lilerthkwake, and we'd love it if you would vote for our entries when the polls come out tomorrow.