Leftover Love

A story about intergenerational friendship.

I’d never been to an opera before I met my friend Dorothy. Nervous about what to wear, I tried on outfit after outfit, finally settling on my trusty serious ensemble: a black fancy top and my nicest pair of black slacks. The sculptor Louise Nevelson, a favorite of mine, always said, paint anything black and it immediately looks more important. I wanted to look serious and important.

Always anxious that I wasn’t good enough, I routinely overcompensated in almost every aspect of my life. So, when my new friend Dorothy answered her doorbell looking very swanky, gave me the once over, and simply said, “Well, you clean up good,” I was immediately at ease. I let my guard down and we settled into what would become a wonderful friendship.

Dorothy and I met in a weekly exercise class at the Santa Monica YMCA. I’d joined to get my creaky bones moving after too long sitting at a desk, both at work, and at home. Always sitting. I wanted to get back into shape physically, never expecting to meet someone eighteen years my senior who would become a dear friend.

She’d lost her opera partner in 2014, the year we met, and asked me if I’d like to join her for the next season. I was 62 at the time, and ready to spend time with a woman exactly my mother’s age, 80. Someone who was helpful, loving and understanding. Dorothy had all those qualities and more. We spent the next eight years attending the opera together, meeting for lunch, texting and talking on the phone. All the leftover love I had to give to a mother, I have given to my friend Dorothy.

Philia (φιλία) is a platonic feeling. The Greek word implies trust, a sharing of values. A soul connection. That life-changing moment which rips the world open once you start loving someone outside your family circle. My family moved around in my childhood, and I don’t have lifelong friendships with people I met in grade school or even high school. Connection has always been difficult. And fraught with shame. Friendship for me is at the core of human experience. We are born into families, but we find our friends.

Friendships, deep friendships at least in my experience, are built on revealing conversations, deep and long conversations, told all at once or over time in a back-and-forth of confidences, often shared in dark locations like the front seat of a car at dusk driving east, someone’s living room over percolator coffee, in haltingly told long held secrets shared in cafes and restaurants in the light of day, teary eyes shielded by dark sunglasses.

We were both born in Missouri, the show me state. Stubborn and doubting. Questioning and also loyal to our own principles. Ours differed in significant ways. Come from how we were raised, she by adoring parents and grandparents, an extended family of supportive aunts and uncles. I aged out of the foster care system at 18 and had seldom seen my blood relatives. At 16 I asked the state of Missouri to find me a safe place to live. I shared all of this with Dorothy, and she shared her oldest memories with me too, in the dark front seat of her minivan on the long drives downtown to The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and then back again to the west side of Los Angeles where we both lived.

Dorothy never married. Never had children. A single woman all her life long. A single woman who was very involved with life. She was a home economics teacher. She taught “the domestic sciences,” as they were called when she graduated from UCLA and began her first-year. The 10 freeway didn’t exist back then, she told me on one of our rides downtown to see an opera. So, she took Jefferson Boulevard all the way to near downtown Los Angeles every day to teach. In the summer she traveled. To South America. To Africa. She’d even learned to fly a plane.

Over the years she told me her stories and I told her my stories. Both of us recognizing and accepting the way they rhymed and the way they didn’t.

Last year my husband retired, and we sold our home in LA and moved to San Diego. “Come stay with me when you come back to the city,” Dorothy said. At her family home, a place she’d lived for almost seventy years.

She offered up her guestroom and we said yes. After a few months in San Diego, we came up to LA and we stayed at Dorothy’s house for the weekend. She cooked us a special dinner the day we arrived. Set the table with cloth napkins and asked us to choose which carved wooden napkin ring we’d like to use for our weekend visit. Every morning of our stay Dorothy left a Post-It note by the coffee pot letting us know what was available for breakfast.

She opened the lid on the blanket chest in her guest room to show us where the extra blankets are stored.

“Oh, how I miss a dog in the house,” she said, and opened the dog door her beloved pet used to use when he was alive. Delighted when ours ran through it and out into her backyard.

On Saturday she fixed a luncheon of her famous Chinese chicken salad and invited the Y Girls, as we called ourselves, four women from the YMCA senior exercise class back in the day. Before the pandemic. Before the Y shut down. Before one woman moved to a senior complex with her ailing husband.

I was the youngest of the bunch, young enough to be one of their children. How I loved sitting around that table with them. Listening to their current concerns, their health challenges. Each woman still engaged with life. Going to the Y to exercise. Playing bridge. Alert and alive and loving women I was so honored to be with. I brought up issues they told me they hadn’t ever considered. And they offered me much needed perspective.

After we finished lunch Dorothy gathered us in a small circle in her living room and dialed our distant friend on her cell phone. And Jeanie, Sharon, Dorothy and I went around the circle, all four of us taking our turn to speak with the woman missing from our circle. Joanne, 93, listened and in turn shared with us how she was doing now. The sharing stopped with Dorothy, who said goodbye for us.

Once everyone left I convinced Dorothy to let me wash the dishes in her kitchen sink. While I carefully washed and rinsed her mother’s silverware she came up behind me and lovingly tied an apron around my waist.

The last night we were there she said to me, “It’s mystery night,” the night she watched Poirot and Sherlock Holmes on PBS. “Would you like to join me?”

“Yes,” I said. Yes. Inwardly jumping up and down with happiness, I sat down beside her. She went to the kitchen and brought out the pecans and chocolate-covered nuts for us to snack on.

“Dorothy,” I said. “I love you.”

“Oh, kid,” she responded. “I’m so glad you’re in my life.”

Originally published on Oldster Magazine Nov. 4^th, 2024