Hello,
I woke up this morning with a memory floating around my head. If you know me in real life, it’s probably a story I’ve told you before, but I’ve never actually committed it to paper, and I want to tell it to you now.
A long, long time ago, a close friend asked her friends to meet her in New York to celebrate her impending nuptials. Now, it wasn’t quite a bachelorette party, with sashes and penis straws and belly shots, but it was an opportunity for us to get together and celebrate our friend and the fact that she was getting married, something she had wanted for a very, very long time.
The problem was, I didn’t want her to get married to this particular guy. There are lots of gory reasons why; let’s just say they were good reasons and leave it at that. Anyway, we were getting together to celebrate my friend, is the way we all looked at it. It was a nice evening night out. My friend had moved away from New York by then, and so had I, but it was nice to re-live our days together as single women tearing around town and being irresponsibly drunk. Plus, I got to meet some of my friend’s other lifelong friends, people who predated me, and I’d known my friend for close to a decade.
At the end of the night, we found a taxi cab driver who was willing to let six of us into his cab (it was his last fare of the night), and since I was staying the furthest north, I was also the last to be dropped off.
The cab driver engaged me in some conversation en route:
“She’s getting married, is she?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t seem very happy about it.”
“I’m not.”
I can’t possibly detail the conversation that took place after this little exchange, because this is not a novel: I sat in his cab for 45 minutes, talking to him through the little transom window, about my friend and our friendship and what it meant that I didn’t feel I could go to her wedding and stand up for her union with this person.
You guys. 45 minutes. I remember the glow of 2nd Avenue; the light bouncing off the asphalt, gold in places and turning red…green…yellow in other places. Red…green…yellow, over and over again, and we talked about what friendship means and whether or not I should go to this wedding. I remember he had a piece of paper in his hands, and he folded it over and over again, and then unfolded it and started all over, as he listened and gave me feedback and talked to me about what I should do and what it would mean if I did or didn’t go.
In the end, his advice was this: You need to go to this wedding, because if you don’t, and the marriage falls apart, she’ll never know if she can trust you to support her.
In the end, I didn’t go to the wedding. My friend was hurt, and angry for a very long time. I don’t blame her, although part of me knows it was better for me not to go, and the other part of me is so deeply regretful that I didn’t go. In some ways I haven’t progressed past that night in the cab.
But of all the amazing things there were to remember that night–being near my good friend, meeting the other people who were important in her life; backtracking through time, it seemed, to a place I thought I’d left behind–I return to that conversation with the cab driver most often. His kindness; the fact that he was willing to give me some time out of the end of his night (and no, there weren’t any expectations or anything gross like that you guys); his very good advice–
I’m so glad someone out there like that exists in this world.
Now I’ve told you this story, and I hope you get as much out of it as I did experiencing it. It cemented something I was beginning to really actively practice back then: everyone has something to offer you.
