Best of Friends

Best of Friends

Today is a funny day for me. It’s funny for several reasons and business-as-usual for other reasons. The day was scheduled to be about waking up to breakfast with our friends Gary & Oswaldo, who came down for a visit from L.A. yesterday and stayed overnight, followed by attending an orientation event at University of San Diego for new teaching faculty and then heading up the coast to Dana Point for an early dinner with an old Wall Street friend whom I am now working with on an expert witness assignment. My day went off-track last night when I was told by my partners at my expert witness firm that I did, in fact, have to get in my first draft of the declaration I am preparing this morning. Luckily, I had written most of it on Sunday (28 pages worth) and spent some time on Monday and yesterday revising it. But I would need to get up early and review my team’s edits and send it off first thing to meet the client’s requests. I did just that and sent off the now 35-page draft this morning. Not knowing how much that would involve, last night I looked more closely at the scheduled orientation gathering set for about noon at USD. USD is a beautiful campus set on a small bluff just north of downtown San Diego, looking out over Mission Bay towards the beach. It is a 35 minute commute under ideal condition (I do not yet know the commutation and traffic lay of the land out here at different times of day and year). My travel time concerns culminated in my moving the “nice-to-do” orientation gathering into the “why-drive-myself-crazy” category. I cancelled my attendance and sent a note to my handlers at the University just so they wouldn’t be looking for me. I’m sure they didn’t care and that it was a perfunctory event, so I used the best of all California excuses, I didn’t want to spend the day unproductively on the #5.

Since my morning was commandeered by my expert case draft work, and my late evening was spent writing my revisions thereto (while watching a new Netflix series called The Chair about Sandra Oh becoming the Department Chair of the English Department of an almost-Ivy University…funny show), I also had to squeeze in my daily blog story, an obligation I take very seriously. I now had the flexibility with my day to not leave for my early dinner until later in the afternoon, but I was getting a text from my friend Oswaldo wondering where his breakfast customer was. I was late for getting my breakfast burrito order into Oswaldo while he was preparing Gary’s breakfast (Kim doesn’t usually eat breakfast). I rushed into the kitchen as soon as I finished my story and proceeded to read it to Gary & Oswaldo to absolve myself of my tardiness since the story was about all the juggling I have to do today.

Gary and Oswaldo have become very, very dear friends of ours in the six years since we met across the fence, so to speak, on Staten Island. It is actually totally coincidental that they have ended up in West Hollywood and we have ended up in northern San Diego County, but to understand the strength of our friendship might cause someone to think that we did this on purpose. Gary & Oswaldo are a gay married couple who had lived in West Hollywood prior to their five year stint on Staten Island. They have many friends in West Hollywood and it is a community in which they are quite comfortable because of the like-minded population and because it is a hip urban setting with lots to do and overall pleasant weather and surroundings. They have world (children and family) that revolve around Tulsa, Oklahoma, Nashville, Tennessee, Washington D.C. and Caracas, Venezuela. They also have a close friend who lives in France.

We have most of our family (sibling level) near us here in San Diego. Kim’s family is here in San Diego and just north and east of L.A.. My family is here in San Diego and spread between Las Vegas and Phoenix. Our friends and kids are mostly in NYC and Ithaca though there is some spreading out going on (my oldest son now lives in Delaware). We have too many friends migrating to Florida (we are not fans of the Sunshine State) a few left in Wabash, Indiana, some up in the northern Bay Area, and then the normal diaspora of friends who have scattered to the four winds around the world. Despite having a goodly number of LGBT friends from Kim’s theater and cabaret life (far more than the U.S. average of 3.5% and even larger than the NY and CA representations of 4.5% and 4.8% respectively) it is like our percentage concentration of Jewish friends. While the Jewish concentration in the U.S. is 2.2%, it is 3% here in CA and a whopping 9.1% in New York. My years at Cornell and years of working in the financial services industry has left my friendship base far more heavily concentrated with Jewish friends than any of these statistics would imply. It is the course of nature for people who have lived in New York and pursued the careers we have pursued that our friend base is the demographic shape that it is. Throw in my Hispanic heritage from my father’s side and the fact that we have shoved to live in Southern California now and you have what I would call a super-diverse demographic composition to our lives. I don’t know that the composition drives our life in one way or another in terms of its characteristics and leanings other than to suggest that it is hard not to think more regularly about the value of diversity. Yes, we are all about diversity in our household.

Based on my funny day today, I am just sitting here writing and thinking this morning. From my living room perch on the sofa with my lap desk and my iPad almost ready to go on power warning status, I can see from the coast to my right to the mountains of the Sierras to my left. It’s not quite from shining sea to shining sea, but it feels like it this morning. Gary & Oswaldo had their breakfast and chat with us and then hit the road with the usual flurry of hugs. They will be home in West Hollywood in the area they find so very comfortable in another hour or so. We are here on our hilltop Kim is out at the grocery store for yet another load of supplies for the big family gathering (her side) planned for this weekend. We are at home here just like Gary & Oswaldo feel so much at home in West Hollywood. Our hilltop is not as liberal-minded as West Hollywood, but w2e like it and the neighborhood is taking a decided turn to the blue as we get new people on either side of us. Our family is blue and gets bluer by the day.

But I am musing this morning about how fortunate we were to meet Gary and Oswaldo in Staten Island. We often joke that it was perhaps the best thing that came out of our mutual stints on the Forgotten Borough. We have travelled overseas with G&O, we have gone cruising to Alaska with G&O and we have driven cross-country with G&O. We know each others’ families for better or for worse and really do share a growing number of common friends now even though our natural communities were only slightly intersecting by historical standards. In fact, we feel blessed to have Gary & Oswaldo as best of friends as evidenced by the fact that we simply spent a pleasant day just chatting and dining together for three meals a movie and a Netflix series. We look forward to our next visit together because with G&O it is always so easy, so natural and so pleasant for us.