Last night, the four of us agreed that we’d arrive at the Democratic headquarters in Reno to canvass for Kamala at 8:45AM, slightly earlier than when they asked us to come. I knew this was good for my husband, who feels much more comfortable arriving early than on time and is never late.
He was waiting in a different car with another friend. One of my oldest friends, Gwen and I hurried toward her car. She stopped and turned around.
“Forgot my breakfast!”
When she came back, we were 5 minutes late. Before we opened the car doors, she paused, “We could go for a 5-minute walk right now!”
“No, we can’t!”
I didn’t pause to think about it, just said it. I knew this woman well enough to know there was no such thing as a 5-minute walk. I’ve missed planes with her because she always wants to get the most out of every minute.
In the decades we had known each other, we’ve had a lot of adventures. Spent three years working as cowhands, riding the range in the high cold sagebrush desert of Nevada, made a film about the people we met there and shared a tiny studio apartment in North Beach while we edited that film. We once took the train from San Francisco to Boston, not realizing the connection time between the San Francisco/Chicago and the Chicago/Boston trains, was 22 hours. Spent the night sleeping on century-old wooden benches in the Great Hall, Union Station’s grand main waiting room, under a breathtaking barrel-vaulted skylight that soared a hundred feet above us.
Instantly, she matched my harshness, “Just put the past 37 years into your back pocket. Let’s start fresh.”
I saw what I’d never seen in all these years: the vulnerability of a girl raised in a respected but unloving family. She would always be that girl, needing people to prove they loved her by giving her what she wanted.
I walked around to her side of the car, took her hands and beamed all the love I had for her, hoping she’d see it, feel it. “Let’s go for an hour walk when we get back, even if it’s dark.”
She softened. “Yeah. Let’s.”
And off we went.