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{Notes from Salzburg}

Barnes and Noble is my hangout. My jam. My Place To Be. While enjoying a dirty chai {yes, I enjoy placing that order}, I remembered an old blog post I wrote when I was studying in Austria. Only my family and maybe two of my friends ever read it – my mom was just glad I wasn’t dead, I think. Anyway, here’s one of my favorites. Susie, this one’s for you.

{Big Bugs}

One of the most interesting parts of this cross-cultural experience has been the realization that, while things are very different, they are also very much the same. People are people. Deep. But seriously, there are families here who live like we do at home.

There are young adults who are full of life and excited about the future. There are lonely old men who sit at Cafe Tomaselli and drink coffee, watching the young people who are full of life.

Things are are a lot like they are at home. Including the fact that huge hornets fly into bedrooms and scare silly girls into screaming.

Last night, Susanna and I stayed up late talking and laughing. It was after midnight, and there’s such a thing as “quiet hours” in Salzburg (that’s right, college students, they exist in the real world apart from finals time…), so we closed all our doors but forgot to close the windows. We were talking about girly things and making each other giggle, when suddenly the largest bug I’ve ever seen buzzed into our room, hitting the ceiling and making Susie jump down from the bunk bed and huddle next to me on the floor. I try not to swear, but I’m telling you, this thing could sting the life right out of me, and we both couldn’t contain ourselves. I’m not even scared of bugs, usually, but what can you do?

Austrian bugs are flippin’ huge.

So I climbed up on to the top bunk and tried to swat it with one of our towels. I hit it, but what’s a swat to a mutant stinging insect? It buzzed right at my face, and I screamed. I was pretty embarrassed that a bug made me scream, but Susie said with determination: “Alright, it’s time to wake the boys.”

Now I am not one for running to a male in a time like this – what can a boy do that I can’t? If it’s gonna sting me, it’s gonna sting him – but I didn’t know what else to do. We weighed our options: Tom wouldn’t wake up, he’s like a log. Jon would wake up, but probably be pretty angry at us and never let us forget it. We decided on Andrew, the outdoorsman, the boy who likes to save people.

Susie knocked on his door, but he wasn’t in there (immediately after our frantic knock, his roommate replied, “Andrew’s not in here. Don’t come in.”). I went back to our room while Susanna went to find Andrew, and I’d had enough. Liz, our friend from the Finland, said, “No one has ever seen a bug that big! I want to make a picture!” And instead of helping me, proceeded to take pictures of the huge deadly bug.

I grabbed the towel again and stealthily tested the hornet’s reaction to my approach. It was preoccupied with preening, so I set in, a fast and furious attack with the towel. I pounded the towel against the wall, trying to squeeze the life out of it, but when I checked the clump, I saw it still moving! So I smooshed the towel into a ball and punched and punched it. By this time, Susie was back with Andrew, David, and Liz, and I looked like a fool punching a towel. I opened it again and IT STILL WASN’T DEAD. This thing was resilient. Andrew took the towel and threw the hornet outside, where it lives on to attack us in our sleep.

So somethings are the same, and somethings are different.

Bugs fly inside and scare girls, but they are a heck of a lot bigger.

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A Past Worth Preserving

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I wrote my great-grandmother’s “biography” when I was nine or ten. It was terrible. It all started because I had a magazine, and I wanted to interview her for the “Premier Edition.” (My aunt had worked for a magazine for a few years after college, hence the language.) I took a yellow legal pad and a blue pen and sat across from my great-grandmother in my dead great-grandfather’s blue recliner. The sun shone hot through the bay window, and I remember feeling pretty grown-up, asking all these questions. I had a legal pad, after all.

I asked her about growing up in the early 1900s. I asked her what she did for fun, what school was like, what her home was like filled with six people. I asked her how her hometown was different during WWI than it is now, and I asked her what she liked to eat and how she met my great-grandfather. I wrote furiously because I didn’t want to miss a word and the thought of writing shorthand never occurred to me. My great-grandmother’s handwriting was always beautiful – smooth and looped – and mine was hurried and uneven and merely served a purpose.

I think I was in awe of the sheer amount of time sitting across from me. Born in 1909, my grandmother had seen both World Wars and all the other atrocities and beauties of the 20th century. I crafted the interview with all the intensity of a ten-year-old who wanted desperately to preserve the past, and a copy of that old magazine is tucked away in my great-grandfather’s briefcase where I keep all my old creations.

I’d forgotten about the interview and the resulting mini-biography until this morning. For Christmas my mother bought me a book by Donald Hall, the former poet laureate: String Too Short to be Saved: Recollections of Summers on a New England Farm. It’s a thin paperback, first published in 1961, and it has a poet’s carefulness of language and transcendent moments.

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Hall writes of his grandparents’ farm and the summers he spent living and working alongside them. He writes of moments in the hayfield when all he ever wanted was to hay, and of a time when he was so exhausted and thirsty from picking blueberries that he couldn’t imagine his 70-year-old grandfather was still plugging away, stripping the low-growing bushes of their tiny wild berries. The love Hall felt for his grandparents and the place is so palpable, it made me fall in love with them myself. His poetry was born in the fields of New Hampshire.

Hall says he had a “need to conserve the past,” and I know that is what I felt sitting across from my great-grandmother, desperate to grasp this other life that I would never know.

It seemed abominable to me that I had only one life to live, and that the realities and hardships and loveliness of this woman’s life would be lost to nothingness when she died.

I don’t think she herself felt such a desperation.

During college, Hall found himself longing for his friends during the lonely summers in New Hampshire. He doesn’t hide the horrible guilt he felt, and I knew exactly what he was talking about; the deep love you have, yet the desire for something stirring inside you.

The book ends as I knew it would. His grandfather dies when Hall is 24, and even though that is the way of every life, I cried. I haven’t cried at a book in a good long time, and I was surprised and glad that no one was around. How can you explain crying over someone else’s dead grandfather? Someone who’d lived a good life and worked hard and loved well?

I think I was struck as much by the beauty as the sadness. There was such strength in the life of this man I will never know, this grandfather who had shaped a young boy more than he realized. I saw the sweet progression of life, the stories of family and friends and small-town myths all woven together. It was not mysterious. It was not filled with world-travel or adventures or death-defying heroic acts. The adventures and heroic acts were contained in the fields of generations of farmers, and they breathe in the pages of this book.

My great-grandmother’s life is much the same way. She grew up and lived in the same city until she was 95 and moved in with my aunt and uncle. She didn’t go to college, but she loved words and music and games. She had four grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, and she made lemon meringue pie and cole slaw for every family dinner. She went to Niagara Falls and took pictures and she attended the same church her entire life.

What is this desire to preserve the past? In some ways it feels like an avoidance. I am constantly living in the past or the future, my eyes set both forwards and back. I hold on to my great-grandmother and my grandmother’s words tightly, as if they hold some secret to a better time. How do I get that? I wonder. How do I get stories? How do I live? I don’t think either one of these women ever really thought about that; living was what you did, not what you thought about.

I am striving to live some huge life, some remarkable, adventurous life. I’m wondering if I have my priorities straight. Maybe a past worth preserving doesn’t have to be of legendary proportions; maybe it has to be true.

Summer 2008 016The summer after I graduated high school – all six of us kids on our yearly vacation.

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Reading Slump

There is a stack of books by my bed that keeps toppling over. Okay, 2.5 stacks. My sister has been gracious enough not to say anything, but I’m sure it’s bugging her. There’s no possible way I could read so many books at once, so why do I insist on having them haphazardly flung around my bed?

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I spend a lot of my time wishing I had more time to read. If only I didn’t have to drive so much! I could be reading RIGHT NOW! The storm this weekend gave me a glorious snow day (!), so I had three days to fill with movie-watching, coffee-drinking, and book-reading (and it was impossible to go anywhere for the first day and a half, so I couldn’t throw my books aside for live friends, like I often do to the poor things). I was ecstatic. I piled books high on the coffee table, eager, unsure of which to start first.

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It didn’t matter which one I chose though. Cost of Discipleship was challenging (and embarrassed me a few times, actually – more on that later), but I got tired quickly. Mary Oliver, with all her beautiful expressions of nature and its inhabitants, could not take me outside my own head, and at the end of each poem, I was unsure of where I’d gone and how I got there. Jeffrey Eugenides, no matter how hard he tried with his characters’ 20th century woes and struggles with depression, could not keep me even half-engaged. Ruth Reichl, in all her food-love and witty descriptions failed to transport me to the world of the New York Times.

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I felt out of sorts, and I didn’t know why.

My book club met this week, and I was (again) the book club delinquent, arriving without having read the extremely interesting Quiet: The Power of Introverts. We had a fabulous time of birthdays and talking, but I hated that I keep not connecting with books.

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Books have been my friends since I was five years old. The first book I read was Fun with Dick and Jane, an old green copy my mom and I bought at an outdoor flea market. Since that day, I’ve devoured all kinds of books, with the exception of science fiction (Sorry, K, I can hear you groaning. I tried.). From Little House to Anne of Green Gables to Betsy, Tacy, and Tib, I read all the classics. And then came the high school standards, followed by four years of collegiate-level reading that sometimes made me want to gouge my eyes out.

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[This was literally the worst book I read in college. It was for an Irish Literature course, and we had to write a two-page journal response to each reading assignment. I remember sitting in the library, looking down at the quad, and realizing life was too short to read such horrid stuff.]

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[We sang a setting of Thomas’s poem “Fern Hill” my senior year of college. I remember asking our conductor, “But what’s going on? What does it mean?” He looked at me and said, “Isn’t that your job, English Major?” I was sufficiently humbled. Here’s a recording of this amazing piece.]

I’ve been reading for nineteen years, but for the past few weeks, books have not spoken to me. I’ve tried. I’ve opened them gingerly, carefully, admitting them into my consciousness. I’ve focused on one book at a time, to see if that helped at all. It didn’t; I felt even more scatter-brained and self-focused while I was reading. I listened to music while I read. I turned the music off. I committed to a chapter a night. I made no commitments.

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[I didn’t discover Auden until the fall of my senior year. “Stop all the clocks” and “The More Loving One” still make me cry.]

My relationship with books is cooling. Or, at least, it seems we’re on a “break.” It’s an awful thing to say about my dear friends of so long. I wonder if this feeling of distance – of complacency – is at all what a long, tired marriage feels like: you have loved deeply, but now you barely recognize your own love.

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[This was for my British Lit class my junior year. I had a skinny little paperback that I riddled with sophomoric notes, and that has since been lost in the abyss that is my bedroom. I refuse to buy another copy.]

I’m hoping it will come back. That my eagerness for books and characters and interesting stories will surge up and remind me of all the wonderful things that can be learned, all the beauty that comes from reading. I’m hoping that a magic book will rest in my hands, transforming my view of the world and my place in it.

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[I read all the Austen novels when I was around 15 or 16. That’s probably the perfect age to read them for the first time. I think I’m almost ready for round-two.]

Until then, I’ll keep reading. A page here and there, at first. And then a little more, and a little more. Again, I see a kinship with that long marriage – a working-at-it until it brims over with new life.

Books teach me new things every day, even when I’m not reading them.

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[thoughts on february]

February is one of my least favorite months (March taking first, I think). I know I can join the club on this one – there’s just something about the post-Christmas-ness of February, the bleariness, the seeming-longness. One of my coworkers has been trying to convince me that in fact, February has a lot to offer. Her biggest argument is a little subjective, though: “Well, my birthday is in March, so February’s great cause it’s right before March.”

Hmmmm….

The days are, indeed, getting longer, as another coworker reminded us via a mass email. There was math involved, and the math seems to show that the sun is with us a full hour more than in December. I am trying to believe it and rejoice accordingly.

~     ~     ~

I was asked to babysit on Valentine’s Day. It was innocent, a quick text sent: “I’m sure you already have plans, but…” She doesn’t know that I promised myself last year: Never babysit on Valentine’s Day AGAIN. I love children. I love these particular children, especially. But there is something oddly demoralizing about watching someone else’s offspring while they do such enjoyable things as eat at a fancy restaurant, coo at each other, and makeout. This happens on a regular babysitting evening, too, but it is inexcusable on Valentine’s Day.

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It doesn’t help that when I look in the mirror, I wonder if my skin could get any more translucent.

~     ~     ~

When I went out to do the chickens this morning, my fingers stuck to the metal waterer. Just for a moment (not quite the drama of A Christmas Story), but just enough that I got a little jolt of “oh!” and realized that I am entirely and completely and unapologetically ready for spring.

That being said, a huge snowstorm is on its way. I love snow. I love storms. I love being cooped up in my house with a hot drink, a good book, and good company.

But after this one? Bring on spring.

IMG_0501Please and thank you.

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Can men and women be friends?

When I was fourteen or fifteen, my father told me at breakfast one Saturday morning:

“Men and women can’t be friends. That’s just the way it is.”

I don’t remember what prompted this black-and-white statement, but I DO remember getting angry.

“Catherine, one will always want more than the other,” he went on, his voice softening a little.

I probably said “I’ll show you!”, or something else really mature, and proceeded to call one of my guy friends to play hacky sack or get pizza.

Since then, I’ve been pretty determined that my father was wrong. I’ve had a number of friendships with guys, and even though only a few have rivaled my female friendships in terms of emotional intimacy, these men have been just as dear to me. Friendships with guys look different, but, I thought, that’s just because we do different things together. Only on very rare occasions do we talk about our feelings – most of the time we play wiffle ball, touch football, a raucous game of foosball, or drink a beer by a bonfire.

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I’ve watched my guy friends date, new girlfriends circulating in and out, me trying to keep my distance long enough to determine if this one’s gonna stick. Weddings are coming up, the girlfriends (now fiancees) are just as dear to me as their guys, and I’m so excited to be part of their lives.

But my father’s words keep echoing in my mind. Men and women can’t be friends. There’s still something about this that doesn’t feel quite right. A little part of me wonders: Am I missing out on a beautiful, romantic love because I’m investing too much in my platonic relationships? Am I giving too much emotionally without expecting more?

Should I really stifle one kind of love in hopes of finding another kind? That doesn’t seem right, either. Friendship love, according to C. S. Lewis, is often even stronger than that of the romantic persuasion. To say otherwise would undermine all the female friendships I’ve enjoyed and grown from for so many years.

I don’t feel like I’m any closer to an answer. Most of my guy friends will never read this, and if some do, they’ll probably be the ones who’ll understand. Maybe these friendships will truly be able to transcend whatever silliness goes along with most male-female friendships, and this caring will teach me how to better care for someone down the road.

That’s what I hope, at least. Or, to quote my father again (he’s getting a lot of airtime these days):

“Maybe you’re over-thinking it.”

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What to do with Joy

This morning I woke up to a little snow on the ground and birds everywhere.

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I also woke up to roughly the fifth engagement announcement on facebook. Two good friends from college got engaged right before Christmas (not to each other!), and the rest of us had secretly been wondering: Okay, what’s the hold-up, guys?

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I didn’t realize Christmas was the time to get engaged. I also didn’t realize how horribly some people deal with their own disappointment.

A status popped up recently, and it went something like this: “Stop posting your engagements on facebook. It just reminds me of how alone I am. Thanks.”

I blinked.

What? Was this person seriously asking others to contain their joy because they themselves didn’t share it?

What about the part in the Bible that says: “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn,” (Romans 12:15)?

I admit wholeheartedly that I have no problem mourning with those who mourn; this comes naturally, sadness, sympathy, and confusion being things I can understand and empathize with.

But rejoicing with those who rejoice? Isn’t that just as important?

The past two years, I’ve realized what it means to allow yourself to experience life fully. And that means allowing both deep pain and deep joy to be expressed.

I would never say to a friend, “Please, don’t cry anymore. I love you, but I don’t want to hear it.” (This despite my previous post about learning how to deal with other people’s pain.)

So how can we think that asking others to stifle joy is an appropriate response? Does the fact that others have found love and are looking forward to a life of marriage make you any more alone? Lonely? Sad?

Would them being single make you happier?

We are called to love one another. And one way that love is shown is through the sharing of joy.

I know that I won’t be able to keep myself from singing it from the rooftops, when I find someone to walk through life with. I don’t expect anyone else to, either.

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Snapshots of a Friendship

One time we made a cake just like Laura Ingalls’s wedding cake. We beat the eggs against a wooden cutting board with forks, “to be authentic.” It wasn’t very good.

We used to have pinecone fights in the neighborhood, run around gathering the wet, sharp cones and then hurl them mercilessly at the other team. We loved it, but the neighbor kids told their parents and we were outcast. We thought at least we were better than our dad and his friends, who used to throw hard little acorns at each other.

Once, in the woods, we all crawled through frozen underbrush to the little stream that had frozen over. It was the coldest it had ever been. We slid on our bellies along the ice, the tall snow-bent weeds hanging over us to make a canopy. We’re like seals, I said.

Man-hunt. The game of summer nights and over-excited pre-teens. We raced around town with flashlights, screaming, scared and exhilarated. She had a crush on the neighbor boy, so that made night-time chasing even more fun.

We used to talk about when we grew up, getting married. She said I’d definitely be in her wedding. I said she’d definitely be in mine. She said she wanted to be seventeen. I said, Oh my gosh, no.

She invited me to Starbucks in September, offered to pay. I should’ve known.

Will you be my Maid of Honor?

I sipped my caramel macchiato.

Yes, I will be your Maid of Honor.

Every December, we had a Christmas Feast. We filled stockings for each other, wrapped up inexpensive gifts, baked a little chicken (with Mom’s patient help). Every year we would string popcorn and cranberries, watch “White Christmas,” and drink hot chocolate with homemade whipped cream.

This December, we will go dress shopping. I will sit quietly as she tries on dress after dress. I will watch her and think about throwing pinecones at each other, concocting terrible plays about wilderness adventures, walking to get ice cream on summer afternoons.

Her mother and sisters and I will laugh and chat while she’s in the dressing room. We will marvel at the passing of time, the beauty of her smile, her excitement.

It feels like the blink of an eye since we were little girls. Thank goodness she waited til twenty-three.

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When God Looks Different Than I Thought

Last night’s small group was a lot more than I expected.

The heaviness in the room made me cry — sitting right there on the floor, with my legs crossed and my striped wool socks on — in front of dear friends and complete strangers.

Because what can you say when everything hangs in the unknown, just waiting to break?

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This is the product of last weekend’s work, the last of the swiss chard standing alone in the corner. It’s too warm for October, and the bees are eating up the sugar water we left out.

I wandered the yard, taking photos, thinking what a beautiful day, and mingled in with those words was a wordless thought.

Something about pain and joy and what it means that God allows such suffering.

How do I interact with the God of Job?

How do I worship when everything is out of order? When a moment of laughing and cookie-eating is shattered by the reality of a tumor?

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I am learning to encounter people in their pain, even though I sometimes feel like running away.

No. I cannot handle this. I’m sorry. Please take your pain somewhere else. 

I am learning to face other people’s pain with courage.

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On Beginnings

I had the best nap of my life. Everyone had told me, “Whatever you do, don’t let yourself sleep. Push through. It’s worth it.” But after showering the grime of three airplanes and a VW van off my body, I suddenly found myself lying on the thin mattress in my hostel bedroom, the Salzburg sun streaming over me. I smiled in my cloud of wet hair and fell into the deepest sleep I’ve ever had. I didn’t toss and turn like usual; my insides were weighted down to the bed like an anchor, and when I woke up, I knew where I was but I still did not believe it. My first day out of the country and I’d slept three hours gloriously away.

I remember other things about my first day in Austria: the walk I took – alone, American, enchanted, and floating – along the street lined with trees and open fields speckled with feathery white flowers. I thought they were edelweiss, only to find out later they were weeds no one cared about. For one afternoon I lived in an edelweiss dream, and if I’d had a wicker basket on my arm I would have been swinging it. I bought a loaf of rosemary bread and a small carton of blueberries to satisfy my overdue appetite. I felt like a dimwit when I couldn’t figure out how to open the sliding glass door of the supermarket (turns out I couldn’t open it because it was a wall). And the late arrival of my roommate and good friend, her toes dirty from travel, but her eyes alight with Munchen stories.

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I’ve always been fascinated by beginnings, by first things. Maybe that’s why I have a whole computer and numerous notebooks filled with witty story-starts, left to dangle in time, either through my quick boredom or my fear of lying. Because that is what I feel like sometimes – I must only write what I see, not what I make up – and all I ever see are beginnings of things. My friends who are artists and writers do not understand this, and really, I don’t either. Isn’t everything we create something we “make up”? And yet the best writing I’ve done is of the things I have seen clearly, the rooms that create themselves with plush red couches and pottery mugs filled with coffee. Whenever I try to make my own rooms – my own characters – they seem false and flat. Even when I see a character clearly, when I see her desires, her hair, her intense way of speaking, I do not always see much more than that, and it is always harder for me to finish stories than start them. This worries me sometimes, if I start thinking too much. Then I calm my over-excited self by telling her, You’re only young, you know. You haven’t really had many endings, so how could you see them?

 

The truth is, though, that I’ve had plenty of endings. That day in Salzburg was over in a flash, leaving itself in my mind in yellows and golds and freshness that few other days have given me. Over thirteen years have passed since the death of my grandfather; those long months of his illness are blurry and sharp at the same time. I’ve seen relationships change that I never thought would end, and I’ve struggled to grant forgiveness even when I haven’t been asked for it. I’ve experienced the end of four long years of studenthood – complete with rushed papers, devoured books, and attempts at lofty poetry. This move away from academia is without a doubt the largest change (and harshest ending) of my life. I am stepping out on the path to adulthood, and I’m not sure I like it. I bucked at the idea of moving home, and now that I am here, I close my eyes against the reality that I need to leave soon. I no longer have a classroom to sit in, a professor to meet with, or a project to put off until the night before. I have glossed over all the hardnesses that have littered the last four years, and I’ve shaped my college experience into a beautiful, winding, light- filled laughing thing that siren-calls to me, Do not let this go. You were never so happy, and you will never be so happy again. This is probably the first time I am dwelling on an ending instead of a beginning; it’s a lot easier to feel unchanged when you are looking back than looking forward. But there is little difference between “unchange” and “stagnation,” and I must constantly fight to keep myself out of that place.

 

I know that endings have a kind of beauty, and I know that the ending of childhood has a melancholy beauty all its own: the close of dependence, the close of naivete, and the lifting of the burden we all feel to be different from who we are. While I can attest to the value of endings, I still think I’ll always prefer the mystery and newness of a beginning. Not only does the beginning hold unknown (and therefore, full-of-potential) events, but you don’t know who you will become in the upcoming story, either. I love beginnings because of the horizonless hope they provide. You do not see the endlessly long plane ride back from Vienna to Boston. You do not see the overwhelmingly sad break-up that leaves you wishing you’d never embarked on the risk in the first place. You do not see that what you’d been studying for years to perfect is, after all, far more difficult than you’d thought. What you see is the world laid out before you, stretching stretching and beckoning you to jump in.

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Blessings and Friendships

This past year (and really, the past year and a half) has been filled with such a mix of things. I wouldn’t call myself a planner — it’s not that I need every step in between before I do anything- but there is a huge part of me that anticipates. I imagine each phase of life, each moment, and when it doesn’t go exactly as planned, it takes me a long time to adjust to reality.

There are times when I feel so overwhelmed by God’s goodness and His gifts that I look at my life and think wow. But then — and sometimes even on the same day — I am equally overwhelmed by the things that are less than perfect. By the hurt I’ve experienced. By the disappointments I’ve faced and/or brought upon myself.

What does it mean when things don’t work out?

What does God want me to learn from all this?

Is it really a scale? Because sometimes, when a good thing happens, I think shoot, what bad thing is just around the corner?

This is not the way we are called to live.

~    ~     ~

I was reading through my journal from last year. It was a hard journal and a hard year. It was filled with confusion, anger, sadness. It’s not fun when someone you thought you knew ends up being a different color after all, a different person from the one you trust. Graduation loomed, and despite all the freedom and newness and excitement that could bring, I was scared.

In the midst of all this, I made a list. It’s what I do.

I listed all the blessings God had given me over the year. It was long. It was diverse.

But what struck me most was the amount of people.

Family. My mother who never tells me she’s too busy. My father who, in his quiet and roundabout way, lets me know that he understands my pain. My brothers and sister who have seen each twist and turn I’ve made as I’ve tried to grow into the woman I was created to be.

Friends. Almost my whole life, I have felt a lack of kindred spirits. There were a few growing up, definitely. Good, fun friends who shaped me. But that didn’t change the fact that I always felt different. It wasn’t until the past few years that I finally feel a kinship with young women like me.

This week I called K. I was driving in my car, and I felt so overwhelmed. Deadlines were coming so fast and I HATE missing deadlines. I was scared about my hospital appointment and I was scared that I wasn’t doing the right thing. So I asked her to pray for me.

She was driving too, but she prayed right there. Over the phone.

I cried while I drove, sadness and joy mixed in.

Because sometimes that is how life is.

Praise God for friends like that.