Best Friends by Sharon J. Wohlmuth, Carol Saline

In thirty-four essays with photographs, best friends describe how they met and the qualities that make their relationships strong Editorial Reviews From Booklist Photographer Wohlmuth and journalist Saline complete their projected trilogy of prose and photo portraits of good, intimate relationships by turning to those of the nonconsanguineous kind. Well, not all these friends are unrelated: the musicians Ahn--Lucia, Maria, and Angella--are genuine sisters, and John and Terri are father and daughter but, separated before her birth because she was immediately put out for adoption, they didn't meet until she was past 30, and then they found that we just clicked right away, as Terri says, and that they could cultivate an entirely different kind of closeness, Saline writes. The other, nonfamilial pals--about all of whom we learn heartwarming and often moving details similar to those relayed about the Ahns and John and Terri--met in childhood, by happenstance, while working together, at events both casual and consequential, etc. As in its two best-selling predecessors, sometimes one or more persons in a set here is famous: singer Patti LaBelle appears with her hairdresser-companion Norma Gordon, and nonfiction authors Gay Talese and A. E. Hotchner happen to be best friends. As before, Wohlmuth's photos catch the subjects looking relaxed and appealingly vulnerable. But, as the presence of John and of Talese and Hotchner betokens, this time Wohlmuth and Saline's purview includes men. A fine conclusion to a justly popular project. Ray Olson About the Author SHARON J. WOHLMUTH is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist and lecturer who has covered national and international assignments for the Philadelphia Inquirer since 1978. Her previous books are Mothers and Daughters and Sisters. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, Lawrence Teacher. CAROL SALINE is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and public speaker. A senior writer at Philadelphia magazine and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Syracuse University, she lives in Philadelphia. Her previous books include Straight Talk, Dr. Snow, Sisters, and Mothers and Daughters. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. I know what it means to have best friends. My friendshipsseveral of thirty and forty years' duration--are the food and water that nourish my life. Once someone joins my intimate circle, I'm positively tenacious about keeping them in my loving grip. Oh yes, I know what it means to have best friends. Let me tell you about Roz and Elaine. Ra Rut, as I used to call her, came into my life when I was three years old and her family moved into the identical row house directly across the street. One day she pushed me off my tricycle. I immediately forgave her. We've been best friends ever since. As children we talked about linking our houses with tin cans and string, but we never bothered because the only time we were apart was while we slept. Our one and only major fight occurred when I lost the election for president of our high school sorority--and Roz won. I was utterly devastated that my best friend would oppose me. Friends aren't supposed to do that! But within a few days, something in my adolescent anguish realized that being friends with Roz mattered more to me than being angry with her. At some unspoken level, I think I recognized that if she wanted something as badly as I did, we both had the right to go for it. There had always been a subtle competition between us. Wherever one of us set the bar, the other strove to match the standard. But rather than creating friction, our rivalry stimulated our personal growth. We are a living history of each other's lives. Fortunately, our interests and lifestyles have developed along similar lines. One reason our friendship has remained vibrant for so long is that we never outgrew each other. We have grieved together for the loss of parents, and celebrated every joyous occasion from our own fourth birthdays to the fourth birthdays of our grandchildren. Roz is not my family--but she might as well be. The last thirty-something years of our friendship have included Elaine, who slipped in with us when she and Roz became neighbors in 1962. We leaned on each other as we muddled through child rearing, adjusted to the demands of marriage and tried to figure out what to do with our college-educated dreams. In the year we all turned fifty, Elaine was stricken with a brain tumor, which, thank God, turned out to be benign. Roz and I convinced the doctor to allow us into the recovery room when she came out of anesthesia. As we stood by her bed, placing ice chips in her mouth and mopping her brow with compresses, we recognized that we were as committed in our devotion to each other as any bride and groom reciting their marriage vows. While we three don't have childhood memories in common, we have weathered the critical years of adulthood in an inextricable intimacy. No one knows my secrets like they do, and no one's advice has been more caring or valuable. Because of them, my wonderful sister Patsy and a handful of others, I have come to learn that what matters in life is having best friends. So it is no surprise that Sharon Wohlmuth and I chose to complete our trilogy on relationships by exploring friendship. As with our previous books, Sisters and Mothers and Daughters, we continue to be drawn to subjects that evoke our passion and draw deeply on our personal experience. Thus it was natural to turn to friendship, which is one of the strongest fibers in the lifeline that keeps us all afloat. We included men this time because our books are as much about feelings as about people. And women do not own the friendship franchise, although the pivotal sisterhood of girlfriends certainly occupies a class by itself. Some psychologists have even suggested that the closeness of women friends is a reenactment of the instinctive mother-daughter bond. Yet men are also capable of profound bonding, although in my interviews they often tended to describe their emotional attachment as the kind of thing women have. Men assume that because women talk so easily to each other, they must reveal more about themselves. Not necessarily. Men can be as connected as women. They just behave differently. Men friends tend to meet around some kind of activity or common interest--like golf, tennis, bowling or business. Women friends tend to meet for lunch, using that activity as nothing more than an excuse for conversation. But underneath, men and women share the exact same view of a best friend--the sense that this is a person who is always there for you. Someone you can depend on to share your happiness, suffer through your angst or cushion your sorrow. As one man put it, To me a best friend is somebody that you call if you're on the expressway and get a flat tire at three A.M. and you've been told it's four hours until a tow truck can be sent. Your friend says,'Tell me exactly where you are and I'll come and get you.' A great variety of factors play into the birth of a best friendship--the age and circumstances under which people meet, what first attracts them, why they remain close, how they fill each other's needs. Yet I found the dominant themes that define a best friend were remarkably similar across the broadest range of experiences. Safety was a word I heard over and over. A best friend is a safe harbor. A guaranteed comfort zone. You never have to explain yourself to a best friend because they really, really know who you are. With a best friend, you can drop your guard and let down your hair. You can cry too hard or laugh too loud and never worry what they'll think of you. Because best friends are nonjudgmental. They will supply you with feedback or advice if you want it and a kick in the pants if you need it, but a best friend will not stand in judgment or make you ashamed of your behavior. A best friend gives you what you expect from a parent and don't always get: z~nconditional loue. Like Boy Scouts, best friends are loyal and trustworthy. A best friend is a love affair without sex, a twenty-four-hour intimacy hotline, a vessel where we can store our most embarrassing, revealing and damaging personal secrets with the full confidence they will never be repeated. Best friends can deliver brutally honest answers in the most gentle fashion. And best friends are a mun~al admiration society. What you see reflected in your best friend's eyes is the wonderful person you want to be. Best friends are the family we choose--without the family baggage. They love us because they want to, not because they have to. And for many of us a best friend becomes the sibling we'd hoped for but never had, either because our parents never provided one or because the sister or brother we've been assigned doesn't live up to our expectations. A man I knew asked his mother on her deathbed, What has been the most important thing in your life?, fully expecting she'd say her husband, her children or her family. Instead, without a moment's hesitation, she replied sweetly, My friends. To everyone who receives our book from a friend, accept it as their tender message of love and appreciation. This gift tells you that, like me, you are blessed to know what it means to have best friends. --Carol Saline 1998 In the room in one's brain where memories are stored, I find it dif6CUlt to retrieve images of myself as a young child playing with a best friend. Nor can I search and retrieve from boxes of old childhood photographs many images of myself smiling into the camera with my arms wrapped around a best friend. In most of the photographs I am with my relatives--cousins, aunts and uncles at our Sunday family gatherings. Yet, there are dozens of pictures of my sister, Beth, and her best friend, Joanie, our neighbor--toothy three-year-olds embracing in Halloween costumes; and now, forty years later, still with their arms around each other at Beth's son's bar mitzvah. Their friendship over the years has become as well worn as the path that connected our backyards. Why there are so few pictures of my own childhood friends doesn't really seem important to me now. I realize as an adult that, unknowingly, my own journey to friendship began with a two-hundred-year-old oak tree that stood between my parents' and our neighbors' houses, dominating the landscape. The oak provided the perfect home for the games of hideand-scek that we used to play. I loved the texture of its worn bark. The massive trunk, too large for me to wrap my arms around, represented permanence and security. My friends today remind me of that oak. Now my arms reach all the way around, and my friends embrace me back. These friendships, full of love and affirmation, fortify my adult life, providing oxygen, color and texture. I look at my friends countless times every day, for photographs of them spill across my refrigerator door. We explored a wide spectrum of relationships in Best Friends, as we did in our other two books, but in this one I found the same themes resonating throughout: trust, family, security, happiness, validation. Friendship is an elective bond, a relationship bound by connection and mutual admiration; and in many ways, it is all the more precious because something so powerful can spring from origins as elusive as a chance meeting or a shared interest. In the course of creating this book, and getting to know the many wonderful people who participated in it, I have become all the more aware that friendship is a uniquely valuable bond, one that we all need and should treasure. Ironically, though, the process of making this book took me away from my own friends for long periods of time. Now, as I write this, I look forward to sitting down over many cups of tea and catching up with those I cherish. --Sharon J. Wohlmuth 1998