Friends

This new year has made me reflect a lot about friends. Most of mine are far away, our friendships established after a couple of intense hours, weeks, or years of shared time and space. We manage to keep in touch thanks to e-mail and the occasional phone call, sporadic contact leading up to a shared lunch or quick encounter in an airport before one of us is to catch a plane and head off to the next far-away destination.

I miss my friends, and I am reminded in these initial days of 2006 that true, lasting friendships are hard to come by and just delicious when they finally fall into your life.

I have been blessed with the opportunity to reconnect with several of these true friends, be it in person or via e-mail. Lambros, my Greek friend I met at a tourist office in Athens when I was 14, wrote a lovely recommendation about me in his blog, The Yellow Spacesheep. He and I used to write real, honest to God letters to each other, faithfully decorating paper and envelopes with crayons and ink sketches each month along with the latest news and reflections from each of our lives. We wrote faithfully to each other for years and years. Each day I would expectantly check the mail to see if a letter from Lambros had arrived. He is an artist, and each new letter usually included a sketch or comic strip for me to hang inside my high school locker.

In the summer of 1999, I visited Lambros and his family in Athens as part of a month long trip to Europe. It was a really difficult time in my life, and I was struggling with the things that torment many young girls in our society - low self esteem, an eating disorder, and an incessant desire to be perfect. Lambros gave me some of the best advice of my life as we painted together in his studio one evening.

"To be truly happy," he said, "you only need to do three things: Love yourself, trust yourself, and learn to say 'no'."

What wise words from an 19-year old boy...

He is now in London, working as cabin crew with British Airways, following his heart. Our friendship is now virtual - I miss our letters - but it is still so nice to know that someone on the other side of the world still thinks of you fondly.

Here in Rio, I've met up with several friends from the past, distant but still close to my heart. Maura, who was my neighbor and classmate when I lived here in 2000/2001, is someone I always make a point to visit when I am in town. She is wonderful to be around, one of those people that just lifts your sprits without even trying. We hung out together the other night, drank caiprinhas and danced to axé music in the first pouring rain of the new year in the front yard of her house.

Maura was there for me during a period of crisis in my life a couple of years ago, when all of my other friends in Rio preferred to forget that anything was wrong and totally avoid hanging out with me or even sending e-mails. But through the whole time I thought my life was over and that I had screwed everything up, Maura was there to remind me that I deserve to be happy, invite me to stay in her house until I felt better, make me espresso and diet cookeis, and tell me that everything would turn out okay in the end.

I met up today with Isabella, a friend from Maringá that I met only briefly at a barbecue about 5 years ago when I was visiting a mutual friend of ours that I'd studied with during my student exchange. Isa is very liberal, a leftist and an environmentalist, and we actually met through a huge argument about cultural imperialism and how the United States is the source of most of the evil in the world today. Needless to say she nearly keeled over when she found out that I am American, with my accentless Portuguese and house in Rio. From that moment on, we became friends. She made a special effort today to take the streetcar up to Santa Teresa to visit me in the Casa Rosa. It was the first time we had hung out since the original barbecue where we met so many years ago, but it was obvious by the effort she made to see me that the seed of a true friendship was planted back in Maringá.

There are so many others that are special to me...Gaby in London, Erin in Austin, Kyle in Burundi, Hannah in Pennyslvania. I am truly blessed.

And I am expcially grateful for these good friends when I realize that many people choose to be near me not because of friendship, but because of greed or falsity or self interest. My eyes have been opened once again to the futility of the students at the business school I attended here in Rio. People that I considered my ture friends have, over the years, shown their true colors and completely abandoned our friendship when it was no longer of use to them...

I have several friends here in Rio that refuse to come to my house since we got the Casa Rosa in Santa Teresa. Why? Becasue the neighborhood has a reputation for being eccentric, for rejecting the upper class Zona Sul way of life, for being dangerous because there is a mix of social classes up here on the hill. People that see no use in having a friend that lives in Santa Teresa, as opposed to friends that live in Leblon, or Barra, or Ipanema.

These are people that were happy to be my best friends when I lived in a different neighborhood, when my mom was head of a money management firm and they needed a job recommendation, when being American was equated with being chic and rich, when I was single and always ready to hit the dance floor. They swore that we were best friends and that nothing would ever change that...

Year by year I began to notice their true colors. The fact that these friends were more concerned with money and status than with the ups and downs that come from a relationship. As soon as I had a crisis in my life, got a boyfriend, moved to a not-so-chic neighborhood (albeit in a bad ass house!)...what was before a fun if not a bit superficial friendship was chucked out the back door along with last season's Louis Vuitton handbag, Ugg boots, yellow Lance Armstrong bracelets, and all the other things that were out of style and no longer propelled that person forward in the eyes of the socialite trash that rules their world.

I am grateful for the true friends I have and that I know will be there for me through crises and successes, monetary affluence and times where you just can't afford to buy a new dress or go out because you've got bills to pay...

People that know how to differentiate money from worth are few and far between, especially in the little business school world I live in here in Rio.