r and o

Here I was, feeling all sorry for myself and my weird new life in the California suburbs -- I drove alone to Walmart tonight, to buy an accordion file to organize the papers in the glove compartment of my Toyota Corolla, then ran on a treadmill while reading closed captioned updates on the 49ers game alone in a gigantic 24-hour gym, near midnight -- rummaging through thirty years of accumulated crap trying to figure out how to clear enough space for set up a life in my parents' house that feels different from the life I had when I was seventeen, accidentally encountering and then crying over trinkets from failed relationships (one moldy Nalgene can do so much), worrying about my wasted potential, fretting over retirement savings, growing annoyed at the mat of black dog hair covering the dirty thirty year-old carpeting;

then! In the pile of ancient artifacts, I find two gifts from two old, old friends, R and O, friends I adore. And let me tell you, readers, it is hard to feel sorry for yourself when you have friends like these.

I met R in 1989. She was walking up my grandmother's street, looking at the sidewalk, and singing a folk song (after a fifth grade lesson on Americana), and my memory is hazy now, but I think we just introduced ourselves and became friends; isn't it nice how nine year-olds can be? I might have first met O in 1992. I think she had a consistent underhand serve and was therefore among the most valuable members on our seventh grade volleyball team. I don't remember much about the first few years of our friendship except that often we called each other on summer afternoons complaining of boredom, and arranging to play one sport or another to pass the time.

Then R was self-described as a "non-conformist" (she taught me this term, and also introduced me to Morrissey), excellent at complex card games (often she would sigh with boredom when I requested a simpleton's game, like Four Blind Mice), and appalled at the people around her (a favorite catchphrase of ours in middle school was "Go pump your sunshine elsewhere"). O was also very intelligent, but more inward-directed and a little obsessive, so that when something captured her curiosity, like a bad joke or Liam Gallagher, it became for her the fixed point around which everything revolved. (For example, O's senior yearbook page was a photo of Liam captioned with a bad Manchester-related joke; this particular obsession went on for years.) I would describe both of them, then as in now, as very bright and deeply weird.

On Saturday, O invited us to a Taboo party that a colleague of hers was hosting in Fremont. We, of course, dominated. R and I were on the same team and the others complained of unfairness because we have twenty years of shared references, and R could simply say "Izzy's" and I would guess the clue, "bagel." But I actually attributed our domination to R's limber mind, not our history. We were playing with linguistically hapless biologists who couldn't think of synonyms for "fruit" and described "tongue" as "like a butt on your face." In contrast, smart, fast R fired off "When we win something, I put my appendage near your appendage to celebrate" for "high five."

We took a break from the game and O sat on a rocking ottoman in the middle of the room and told a nonsensical joke, cracking herself up in the process. She was indifferent about baffling the others. I recalled suddenly that one of O's twelfth birthday gifts was a handmade book compiling terrible jokes, and that after that gift there were many scenes like the one above; jokes about ketchup and Bob Saget come to mind. O texted me out of the blue tonight to say "monotremes=platypus and echidnas." She takes on dares when they are practical; once she sat through a Korean dinner with a bald cap on because I said I would pay for her dinner on that condition; on Friday, we had to stop her from drinking a pint of salsa for $25.

I digress. I wanted to write about the two things I found tonight in my drawer of yellow paper. The first is a birthday gift for me that O must have made around 1996. It is a homemade book entitled "[Bananarchist]: Gone With the Hay," with the epigraph, "A debut novel by aspiring chair-designer and writer now traveling the universe, O the Great [last name]." It is a loosely told tale of me eating hay, having hay stolen from me, and then O eating me, written in promiscuous rhyming couplets. Most illustrations are atrocious line drawings, including one of a formless lump that even O recognized to be unrecognizable (the word "monkey" is written above it, with a line pointing at the drawing), but a glossy photo of Liam Gallagher appears halfway through. The things that O was good at drawing at the time -- a seal, a hyacinth, and the rear end of a hippo -- make appearances in the book, though these illustrations are not related to the action. In the final episode of "Gone With the Hay," O comes to visit me on my island of hay and she suddenly turns into a Sweet Valley High book. Her head is drawn as a square with these words inside: "Sweet Valley High: Wakefields Sniff Glue!"

The second thing is a letter that R wrote me sometime in 1996. Apparently we wrote letters to ourselves to be used in case of friendship emergency; freshman year had been a hard time for us. On the envelope, R wrote, "to [bananarchist], not to be opened until you realize you hate me, or 9/9/99, whichever comes first." She also enclosed a Simpsons trading card depicting Bart Simpson writing "I will not undermine traditional American values" on the blackboard. I'll just copy the letter below:

dear [bananarchist],

while you read this, smoke is probably pouring out of your ears and the last thing you want to do is listen to something i have to say. but hear me out. apparently, i have done something so unconceivably awful that you would just be clicking your heels in excitement if you heard that i was dead. but wait a minute. didn't we say on march 6, 1996 at approximately 11:00 pm that this would never happen again? i think so. so why are we letting this happen again -- wouldn't we like to think that we are in control of ourselves and can keep our word? i am probably a little peeved at you right now, too, because generally that's the way things work when the silent treatment is occurring. but as you are reading this letter, i am probably sitting on my bed crying and reading the letter that you wrote to me on march 6, wishing that we were still on good terms. now i don't know what terribly retarded thing i did this time, but whatever it was that i did to cause you to hold such anger toward me, is it really worth it? i mean it's not as if we have all the time in the world together. in a couple years/months/days/hours we'll be leaving each other for college or whatnot, and the last few times we spend together shouldn't be times of resentment. [bananarchist], we have shared some of the funniest, craziest, and wonderful times, that unless i went and killed your dog or something, we should get over it. how could anyone forget our trips to great america, or walking home from school in fifth grade, or singing "when the saints go marching in," or talking late into the night every friday or saturday, or flipping each other over in the grass, or dancing at sadies with our liked ones, or sitting on the grass in ninth grade drawing the kiosk and having orange feet, or cutting art to get in line for yearbooks, or dancing like a bunch of maniacs at those retarded dances, or simply being in each other's presence? how could we just throw out all of those fond and silly memories for some retarded squabble that we are having? you have been one of the most influential people in my life, ever, and the thought of not growing old and gray with you has never once crossed my mind. so i'd like for us to think about the situation; is it worth hating each other for another six months and going through hell avoiding each other? is what i did bad enough to sacrifice all those nostalgic memories? it is unimaginable to me that you are even reading this letter now, since you aren't supposed to read it until we are hating each other, because i cannot imagine us not being anything but some of the best of friends. please, please please, try to patch things up. i'm always here and won't hang up on you or anything. chances are by the time you finish reading this i'll have called you to apologize because i just read the letter you gave me way back in march. take care and don't be afraid to call me because i do not want this to last for another minute. you are my sunshine and the wind beneath my wings and i love you. dear to my heart you are, r. (just in case) 415 858 XXXX.

Well, aw.

This was back when the area code on the peninsula was still 415, when we had long summer days to craft elaborately silly gifts for each other, before we became self-conscious enough to be embarrassed by big statements. I had forgotten about these treasures until just now, and I think I will put them right back where I found them, so thirteen years later I might be delighted by them again. Thank you, dear R and dear O!