Skip to main content

Friendship Ode

Watched Firefly Lane recently and wondered why so many viewers (myself included) enjoyed it. It has many flaws and is ridden with cliche and predictability. These are the kinds of defects that sink a show but somehow this got watched plenty. A no-limits friendship is likely every person's dream though very few find it in their lifetimes. A friendship that begins in childhood and lasts for life is also highly desired but not always possible. These things come to pass for Kate and Tully in the show and the viewers live their own friendship utopia watching them.

In real-life for the average person (like myself), a spouse enters the scene and what used to be a great friendship transforms into a frosty acquaintance at best. They keep you in their thoughts and prayers but are no longer able to be in your life because it disturbs the equilibrium of their marriage. You drift and drift until decades pass since your last conversation. You decide after much hesitation to call this person to see if there are any signs of life left, if that long ago time when this person was your closest friend was only in your imagination of a romanticized past. She sounds just the way she did back in college when you answer the phone. She remembers small details from those years that you have long forgotten. There are old inside jokes you can still laugh about but that is all an inch deep. There is nothing beyond that one hour that compresses the lost decades. 

You know there will be no more than a couple of pleasantries exchanged per year if you are lucky. I can imagine she would love Firefly Lane too - it conjures up a vision of the world that does not exist for her, like it does not exist for me. I am grateful for the friends I do have, specially the couple that go back to childhood. While it is absolutely nothing like the two characters in the show have, it is still remarkable that we have stood the test of time, the many upheavals in our lives and being separated by continents and oceans. They are the people I would never hesitate to contact when I am stressed, sad or upset - they know what it takes to help me restore my balance. They are also the first to know the happy news. No matter what the state of friendships in our own lives, I think we can imagine it extrapolated to Firefly Lane level, adjusted to our realties. That is why the show wins big.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more