My friend Helen

drawing by Helen

Monday, June 6, 2005. Tucson AZ

I dreamt about Helen all night. She was my friend back in NYC. We were friends long time since the days of womens liberation in the '60s. I know Helen has friends who predate me because she has all her old friends. She is still best friends with the girl she played with when she was 7 years old, she is still best friends with the girls she went to camp with when she was 13, she is still best friends with her friends from college.

When you are friends with Helen you become friends with all her other best friends, with Joanie from when they were little girls, with Marlene and Judy who she met in camp, with Laura who she met in college, and with all her other best friends she made along the way. With Pat who became her best friend from womens liberation also. I probably have more in common with Pat than the other girls because Helen met both of us in womens liberation. At least we were in the same place at the same time. One of the girls Helen was best friends with in college, I met on my own, before I met Helen, and we had brief friendship of our own. It was one of the things which drew Helen to me when I first met her, that I knew her best friend from college, and also that I met a few times her old college boyfriend when he was dating a girl I knew.

Helen and I became closest half-way between the time when we first became friends and the time we are in now. When Pat moved out to marry Bruno and moved to CA. I remember calling her the day after Pat moved out and I said '“are you lonely” and she said “I spent last night sleeping in my clothes on the couch.” There is freedom in living alone. I guess it seemed like a vacancy in her wall of friends so I moved in into that space, plus I wanted to be close to Helen, we hadn't really been close. We began to spend time on the phone together. I was loving to Helen and she was loving to me. When I did some booboo to my foot she drove down with a shopping bag full of food for me. She was an angel. When she got married and my marriage ran into problems our closeness drifted away again but it was sweet time while it lasted.

When I moved to Tucson I was willing to let all my NYC friends go, not right away, but after about 4 years here. I decided not to hold so tight to them, just open up my palm and let them go. So they all drifted away, except for Helen, she held on to the friendship.

And then to everyone's shock about 5 years after that Helen moved to Hawaii, she ran away from her marriage and took their son and moved to Maui. And I think then she and I identified with each other because we had made the same move. We weren't together in physical space, but mentally we shared a space. I knew what she was going thru leaving New York, and arriving in Maui, where she didn't know a soul. And she knew then what I had gone thru moving to Tucson. Plus both of us were in paradise now and no longer in New York.

She may not be aware I know her whole experience of the move and she may not be aware I had the same experience. Because of course she moved with her young son and her whole focus was helping him settle in to new place, wanting him to be happy there. And because it is traumatic and emotional thing to move a son away from his dad and because it was end of Helen's marriage. Altho Helen's marriage was not gazillion years, she did not have to go thru the earthshaking change of being married woman to single woman, because she had been single woman her whole life till she married Gerardo, and it was not gazillion years she was with him. I think the part about picking up the thread of her single life was not so hard for Helen. I understood the ups and downs in her marriage too cause I had the same ups and downs. In fact it was those ups and downs which resulted, in their own way, in my moving to Tucson, just as it resulted in Helen moving to Hawaii. Except Helen left her husband behind in NYC, and I moved with my husband to Tucson for fresh start.

Helen had been a career woman in NYC. She had good jobs because she got in computers early and she had flair for computers. Before that she had been like the rest of us, just taking the jobs which were around, working on and off for the school system like the rest of us. But her jobs with computer were real jobs out in the world. And then she found the perfect job for her. She worked at Yeshiva University helping their students learn computer. Helen is a great teacher. She taught me how to learn computer. She was very happy on that job but she had to leave it when she moved to Hawaii.

In Hawaii she didn't go back into the working world. It turned out her talent for reading palms was in demand, she earned money that way. Also she did substitute teaching. Also she acts in plays. Also she sets up computer ads on line for people. She has more of gypsy life in terms of earning money and she loves it. She loves the opportunity to express more of her creativity. And she bought a house there and her son goes to private school. Things are working out beautifully for Helen in Hawaii. Altho the change from having so many friends to having no friends at all is an oasis of quiet in her life. She will start to make friends, it happens naturally, I saw how it happened for me in Tucson, but it doesn't come right away. It has something to do with putting roots down in the new place. Friendship is one of the flowers on the plant as the plant emerges from below ground to above ground, and takes its own time.

When she moved to Hawaii the very first thing she did was set me up on email and internet. I did not know how to go on them before. And of course it opened up a huge new world for me. Strictly speaking you could say I have been an internet addict almost from the instant Helen set me up on internet. It's always clear what a friend offers you, but you never have an idea of what you offer a friend. It seems like I have always been on the receiving end of Helen's gifts. Altho I am the one who helped her write her resume which launched her whole new career woman life.

Luckily I have talent for writing resumes, and my talent increased when Trudy showed me the resumes she wrote for people. Trudy had talent for writing resumes too, and when she showed me her resumes, I got some new ideas to add. I had just seen Trudy's resumes the week before, when Helen called to ask me to help her write her resume. And it was because of what I saw on Trudy's resumes that I added to Helen's resume she got all As in her computer courses at NYU. And it's possible that in the job she did land, the one at Atari, that was the one where the interviewer started to ask her how she did in computer and then he said “O I see, it is right here, you got all As,” and he hired her.

I was not on computer then myself, I typed up her resume on my selectric typewriter, but I was into xeroxing my stories then. I knew what the xerox store had to offer, so we went together to choose the paper for it, a nice paper. And Helen could choose the color of the paper she wanted and she chose a nice shade, of ivory I think, unless it was tan, I don't remember, but it was attractive. And it worked, Helen got the job.

Her friend Wendy helped out too by buying her a suit for interviews. It was suit by Hallston, the designer Jackie Kennedy liked, and Helen looked ravishing in her Jackie Kennedy suit. That girl looks good in a suit and it was a nice suit. So between her suit and my resume, and the fact that Helen really did have talent for it and she wanted it, and she is a nice girl, she got the job and she loved the job.

And of course Helen's peculiar behavior when she arrived at my house for her resume made us so much closer. I put the chair by my desk and I said “now we will write your resume together.”

But Helen would not. She lied on my bed, put my pillow on her face, and she said ''I refuse to write my resume, you can pull out my hair but I won't write my resume.” Luckily that was no problem for me. I said “fine you can lie there with the pillow over your face, I will just go ahead and write your resume for you.” Of course in real life how can I write a resume for someone with a pillow over their face who refuses to talk, I don't know their job history. But I rolled a piece of paper in my machine and I began. I had to ask her a few questions to get started, like what is her address and I wrote down her phone number. And for a while she answered the questions from the bed in a mumble. But then she relaxed herself and I think she sat on the chair next to me and we finished up her resume.

I only wrote one page resumes. Because I didn't have computer I would retype it several times to make it all fit on one page. And Helen was delighted with it. She read it a few times and she liked it. I had two different copies. That was it. We made one copy for jobs where we thought they'd like Helen for her artistic qualities too, and then one copy which was totally straight. We called it "the artistic resume" and the "straight resume". And when she went to choose the paper and the color of the paper at the xerox store, she chose prettier color (was it lilac) for the artistic resume.

After we finished the resume Helen gave me a haircut. At that time I had opened up a business doing resumes, and Helen opened up a business doing haircuts, but in fact our businesses never really went anywhere. I never intended to charge my dear friend Helen money for doing her resume, but she gave me 50 dollars, and she gave me a beautiful haircut, and I was floored at her overflowing gifts to me. And after the lovely haircut we went to xerox store together. And now she had two manila folders, one said artistic resume on top, and one said regular resume. And Helen was pleased as punch. And she sent off her artistic resume to Atari and that is the job she got. And that began off one new chapter in her life.

We spent time again at my desk when her friend Wendy bought me a computer and Helen came over to teach me how to word process on it. People had tried to teach me before and I even went to a tutorial, the man in the computer store gave me a tutorial, but nothing was working till Helen came over. What Helen said was “just begin to write on it, you'll learn as you go.” And that is what did the trick. I began to write on it like I did on my typewriter, and once I started to write on it I saw it worked for writing. And then Helen explained to me about customer help. And the first time I called customer help I was in awe. I could not believe it. Someone would patiently spend all that time walking me thru everything on the telephone. I was so grateful. I called customer help all the time. I was someone who needed a lot of help starting off. It was really a gift from heaven what customer help would do for you back then.

It must have been between jobs, after Helen had that job for a few years, she went to Nicaragua to teach computers there, and that is where she met Gerardo. And when she came back they were husband and wife and her mom had bought her a co-op in the Bronx so they moved into it together. Then they went back to Nicaragua to adopt a baby son and then Helen began working at Yeshiva teaching computer there to their students.

When their son was one year old, a few months later, I moved to Tucson, so I don't know anything about Helen's New York life after that, except for a few phone calls and what she wrote in short stories she sent me. I know her mom came from Florida to live with them, and Gerardo's brother came up from Nicaragua and was living with them too, and Gerardo and his brother were very nice to her mom, and I am sure that meant a lot to Helen. And I talked on the phone to both Helen and her brother when her mom went to Heaven.

I realize now that even tho I knew some of the events during Helen's life in the Bronx while I was in Tucson for those 9 years until she moved to Hawaii, I have no sense of what really went on. She must have worked hard tho, she had fulltime job, she had her son, she was cooking dinner everynight for her husband, mom, his brother, and their son. But no one moves to Hawaii or Tucson unless their NYC life collapses. And now both Helen and I have our brand new renovated life in Hawaii and Tucson.