I am reminded it is Valentine’s Day by the eye-catching red cards in shiny plastic wrapping at the local Lidl. I avert my gaze to my shopping list that guides me down the aisle to the safety of the green beans. I have never circled this date on a calendar or marked the day with anything special. At best it’s been acknowledged by a homemade card with a silly rhyme conjured up in minutes or a sleepy morning kiss and a mutter of “Happy Valentines Day”. I have neither made nor hoped for a fuss on February 14th of any given year, yet it’s often left me feeling disappointed. A strange sense of missing out, but not wanting to be involved either. And perhaps this year, I am feeling a little more prickly about it.
Love is not easily defined nor confined to the realms of romance. According to Marti Pellow, love is indeed, all around us - between family and neighbours, it bonds us to our pets, it’s the kindness we show to those struggling with the hand they have been dealt, it’s found in the withholding of judgement and the shelter of an embrace. It’s the warm glow between old friends who hold close those unspoken things no one else knows. Love lives is in the effortless resumption of a conversation, as though neither time nor distance has passed between. Today it is this love I honour and share with you.
This is Lynn, beside me in the photo above, one of my oldest friends. We met over 20 years ago, it's a story that began back in late summer of 2003, in New York City when I was 21 years old.
It's August or maybe it's September 2003 in Riverdale, a respectable Jewish area north of Manhattan, New York. The air feels like a cloying wet blanket that I've walked into, like a spiders web that binds and clings to me. The heavy, humidity stifles my breath. Beads of salty sweat run in rivulets down my temples, the new black shirt prickles in my sticky underarms. Squinting against the screen glare, I hiss "ahhhh fuck it" as the atm outside the bodega flashes - insufficient funds. No withdrawals under $10.
I half walk, half jog the long blocks to a bank to withdraw my last $8.56. I desperately need to catch the subway to 8th avenue in Manhattan to start my new job as a waitress in The Joshua Tree Bar & Restaurant. It's my first shift, a trial and I have no choice but to prove myself. I'm already a hot, sweaty mess of pooling panda eyes and frizzy hair. I'd been staying in an apartment belonging to a far out connection whose kind goodwill had understandably, run out. I need this job, I need the money.
I'd arrived a few weeks before in the steaming heat off a late night bus from Boston. In youthful poor judgement, I'd sadly burned my bridges with friends there who had been good to me and decided on a whim it was time for a fresh start under the bright lights of New York City.
My first day in the Joshua Tree, I'm buddied up with Lynn, who’s instructed to train me up on the menu, how to input orders in on the touch screen system, the back-breaking, spirit-crushing list of daily and weekly cleaning chores. In a prounounced Dublin accent she welcomes me to the gang. Her memory for retaining customers' orders is sharp, her smile comes easily and she has a sense of mischief about her that is hypnotic. She sprints lightly up and down the steps on neat size four feet, from the kitchen to the bar to the restaurant above and back down again and survives on a few hours sleep each night curled up a friend's sofa in a studio apartment along the A train line.
A few weeks later we sign our names along a dotted line on a joint lease of a three bed ground floor apartment in Woodside, Queens. The kitchen eminates a smell of urine, seeping up from the dank apartment in the basement below. Our downstairs neighbour is a gentle, but bewildered, old man, an Irish immigrant from Co. Clare who drank himself to incontinence. Most afternoons we pass commentary on the weather with John on the front door step and leave a few fry-ups of imported Irish sausages and bacon on a covered plate at his doorstep. He doesn’t hear the bell ringing anymore. Our upstairs neighbours, a hipster couple with matchy-matchy names like Jill and Jim, bum weed from us at weekends.
In our house we splash out a stereo with tower speakers and a super woofer (whatever that is?) before we buy a bed. Drag a sofa from the Salvation Army store and plonk it beside the $3000 sofa "donated" to us by our boss - an angular jawed, slicked back hair, muscular armed, discontented woman in her early thirties. A daughter of an Irish Italian family who own cavernous sports bars in Midtown, she pays us $10 a day to wait tables. No matter the drama or tears, we learn to smile for tips, from tourists to the theatre district on the hunt for a cheap meal with a glass of water.
In our timber lath house on 42nd street a few blocks from Woodside's 7 train station, we gain two more room mates, Maria from Dublin and Sarah from Navan and during our tenancy, lose count of the revolving romances. A smorgas board of colour, creed, culture and ethnicity. Between waitressing shifts, we explore nightclubs of heaving, thumping, grinding, bumping, R'n'B, rap, dance, trance and power ballads. Four wild twenty something year old women finding their way, taking our lead from the city that never slept.
Rarely we venture beyond New York. But one summer, the lure of sunshine and sand takes hold of Lynn and I. A much needed break from split shifts and cleaning ketchup bottles in The Joshua Tree. Like the many millions of Irish before us, who'd alighted on to the shores of the United States. we didn't have visas, so airports were risky business. Instead we catch an overnight bus to Virginia Beach, some 15 hours south. We fall off jetskis screaming with laughter, read Marian Keyes novels with creased covers and dance until the pale pink sun rises up over the dunes. On our last night we drink warm Jack Daniels from a cola bottle on a hotel balcony with a gang of southern drawling, young men, fresh out of army bootcamp having a last hurrah before flying to Iraq. Tall, handsome, tattoed, devoted to cause and country and prepared to die before their 30th birthdays.
Night rolled into the day and on route to the long bus ride home we stop off at a tattoo studio to snatch in search of a final memory. One snap decision later and Lynn's belly button shines with a purple jewel. Back in the speeding taxi, the wind whips back my hair as we caterwall "Sweet Child of Mine" from the open windows. Tanned arms flail to the drum beat, dog tags swing around our necks and we wear matching white vests with “Lynn & Peg’s Road Trip Virginia Beach 2004” printed across the shoulders in a black spray paint font.
Sleep deprived, drunk and very giggly we stumble onto the Greyhound coach and cruise by state after state. The miles and daylight wear on, I spend most of the journey creased over a splashing toilet bowl saying goodbye to Jack Daniels, his Russian friend raspberry Stolichnaya vodka and their partner in crime, cheese pizza. Between bouts of nausea I crawl back to my seat rousing Lynn from her slumber where she laughs at my pale face and sunken eyes and raises her arm for me to bury under.
Through our times together, Lynn showed me what standing up for yourself looks like, she speaks up for those who cannot and hugs after fiery disagreements cool down. She has given me her last dollar, stood by my immature decisions to stay with lads who were bad news, passed me Baby Guiness shots between homesick sobs and we've peed on a few accidental pregnancy tests along the way! She teased my dancing mercilessly - I don't dance much since. All good character building lessons!
Our time in New York was over 20 years ago. Both Lynn's and my life have had many ups and downs. We've travelled, fell in and out of love and suffered losses. Sometimes many months passed without contact, as I wound my way around countries, forgetting birthdays and missing occassions. We earned educations to be proud of and rose up through careers. We both bounced off the bottom in different ways and climbed back up a little more bruised perhaps, but as wiser women.
Despite the decades, distances and differences, it felt like only a New York minute ago when we were Sprite (Lynn) and Peg (Maeve) running wild from the Bowery to the Bronx owning little more than three outfits of clothes each, an upturned plant pot for a coffee table and a bulky sound system that made the walls vibrate with the cat calls of Kid Rick and the warbles of R. Kelly. Surrounded not by things but by a wide, eclectic group of friends from the projects of Brooklyn to villages in Ecuador, the pueblos of Mexico to the hills of San Francisco, the rolling plains of the Carolinas to the corn fields of Idaho, the beaches of Puerto Rico to the flats of Manchester. This weekend, as Lynn and I rounded off a long over due catch up on her first of hopefully many to my little home in the trees; she wistfully recalls "we weren't clueless kids, we were strong, brave young women, who landed in New York alone over two decades ago to learn about life".
In some ways everything has changed, in other ways, nothing at all.
May you all be lucky enough to know love like this. Here's to many more double decades of friendship and memories like these. Lynn, thank you for being my friend 💚