GLPs

Last week I wrote about how hard it was to write. But this week it was so easy because I spent my time not worried about any fancy form or interwoven narratives–I just wrote an appreciation of someone I love dearly. 

Dear listener, I’m loathed to give advice, or, worse, homework. But perhaps after listening to this episode you can write something–doesn’t need to be more than a text–to or about someone you love. And don’t worry about having waited too long: Dia de los Muertos is coming up, so it’s a good time of year even if your person is on the other side. 

Here goes.

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Andi’s always been ahead of me. She always sees it first. 

I’m certain she could tell you plenty about the first time we met. Normally I’ve got a stellar memory, but as I said Andi’s always ahead of me. I just have a hazy memory of meeting her. At the time I was an admin coordinator for a small liberal arts college’s Residential Life office. I knew the friend she dropped by the office with, and the main thing that stood out to me was that they were both from Wyoming, which before meeting them was a pretty theoretical state to me. 

But I met lots of students and it seemed like every year I had a growing cadre who would hang around the office, and therefore around me. Andrew and I bonded over the old houses of New England and I introduced Chase to miracle berries. I remember shocking a member of the college’s Young Republicans club by saying I liked socialism (well before Bernie Sanders must have put the fear of godlessness into that young boys heart on the national stage.) I met students whose names I now hear in the credits of NPR. I met activists and artists I now follow on social media. I remember well some students who can’t possibly remember me, and I remember best the many students who went on to become my friends, like Andi.

Andi’s ahead of me. Sure, when we met I was a full-fledged grown-up with a house and a car and a job, and a husband. Andi didn’t have the husband, sure, but she easily bested me in the other categories. Andi, the second of four daughters, grew up on thousands of acres of Wyoming highland living and working on the family ranch of hundreds of heads of cattle. Even though she’s 7 years younger than me, we definitely started driving around the same time. She definitely started working earlier than I did. And I know for a fact that she got her first horse at age six, something that at age 36 I’m still waiting to happen. 

Doesn’t matter how much older I am, she’s done more than me of most things: ridden more horses, midwifed more cow births, cooked more eggs for more ranch hands at 3 am, and driven cross country. The only thing I’ve done more of than her is anything pop culture related. She’s the only person I know who’s never seen Friends so she must think I’ve come up with a uniquely bizarre intonation when I say to her, could you BE any cooler?

OK, so how did we get from her first day of freshman year to this essay, with so little in common in between?

Of course, it’s because of Andi. She’s ahead of me. She always sees it first. 

She saw early on that we were going to be friends. A year after we met I’d moved to another office at the college, one helping students study abroad. Students could meet with either me or my colleague regardless of academic interest, but it was widely known that my colleague was the go-to for anyone interested in Latin America, whereas I was the go-to for the Anglophiles. 

I thought there was a mistake on my calendar when Andi came to the office to meet with me about studying in South America. I tried to palm her off on my colleague next door but Andi wouldn’t budge. I could text Andi right now and ask her why that was, why she didn’t budge. I wrote her a few paragraphs back, confirming the age of her first horse, so I know I could ask her for her account of it. But I’ve asked her before why she came to me for advice I couldn’t gave her and she’s always said something along the lines of “Oh Nargret, it was always you.”

You see, ahead of me. 

So I kept having meetings with this kid that I liked, but didn’t get quite why she liked me. We didn’t have anything in common. I couldn’t have been particularly useful about South America (I’d never been; never even thought to go, and didn’t know a word of Spanish. Nada.). And yet she seemed so confident that I was her person. 

So we got her teed up to go to Mendoza, Argentina when I finally thought of a way I could be helpful. She was the only student from our college going to Mendoza that semester and I remembered from my years studying abroad and traveling this funny thing about being solo. I remembered how strange it was to be someplace beautiful, or historic, or special, and wanting to take a picture. But not just a picture of the beautiful or historic or special place with no representation of myself–after all, I could have just bought a postcard if I wanted a way better representation of that place than my crappy first-generation digital camera could provide. So when I lived abroad I bought a small garden gnome for about £5, and I would take pictures of him during my travels. Of course, Gnomie, as I called him, had long ago shattered, but I had a small stuffed polar bear, the mascot of the college. And so I gave her the polar bear, and a hug, and wished her luck on her semester. 

I’m sure if you looked for it you could still find somewhere on the web Andi’s blog about her semester up against the Andes mountains of western Argentina. How I loved reading her posts. I really knew nothing about Argentina, but through her writing, I came to have a picture in my mind of life in the central highlands of South America’s ranch and wine regions. And to my delight, most posts had pictures–of Argentina, of Andi, and often of that little polar bear stuffy. I felt like in this small way she’d taken me with her to this place I never would have taken myself. That was one of the many brilliant things about getting to know students at that college was so many of them did things that I could never have imagined doing myself in college. Chase who I mentioned before studied post-conflict resolution in Rwanda. Ben split a year between studying Japanese in Kyoto and environmental studies in southwestern China. Eleanor went to Cambodia one summer, Scotland one semester, and then Vietnam after graduating. The adventures these students went on truly inspired me. Actually, they didn’t just inspire me. They changed my outlook on the world. They changed my life in fact. And of course, Andi was way out front with all of this.

When Andi came back from Argentina we really got to become friends. I’m not sure I can recount any specifics about those conversations, not because I’m being discreet but because my memories of that time are emotionally-based on feelings of growing admiration, mutual understanding, and joy in spending time with her. 

What I do remember well is the hours we spent together the summer before her senior year when, in my other role in the college’s student fellowships office, helping guide her through the writing process for a competitive fellowship to return to South America after graduation. 

That was always a difficult writing process requiring reflection, summarization, flexibility, precision, and aspiration–all articulated in two tight and persuasive one-page essays. The best writing process occurred when the student and I had established trust in each other, so that I could say things like, don’t you think you should mention the work you did on X, or I think you’re underselling yourself here or at times I think you need to start over. 

I find that as I write this I want to say that over the years I became really good at advising for these two essays. In my later years in the role I felt like I had designed an approach to advising these essays that I believe was really innovative and effective, and the college went on to be #1 in the country two years running for receiving so many grants. 

While many many factors went into that success–faculty support, committee interviews, early awareness of the opportunity–I hold that the essays are at the heart of the applications. But they’re tricky. And not even the same kind of tricky: the two essays are the complete obverse of each other. One is formulaic and factual. The other is loose and personal, defying any formula and therefore relying on creativity and selectivity in conveying a first-person account of who you are. 

But it took time for me to achieve the expertise to advise these two very different essays, especially because, as I eventually realized, most applicants found one of the essays straightforward and the other essay challenging, and so with the dozens of students I would advise in a given year I had to go back and forth between students struggling with the formulaic essay and those struggling with the creative one. 

Yet when I worked with Andi I was still starting out. I didn’t quite know all of the strategies that within a few years I could deploy so readily. 

So one of my main memories of working with Andi was getting stuck in one of her essays, the personal. I knew it didn’t work, she knew it didn’t work, and neither of us could figure out how to get her unstuck in her writing. 

And so here I was with the person who was literally the coolest person I knew–I know–struggling to articulate how she got to be so cool. I wish I could tell you that I found the writing advisor equivalent to singing Bruno Mars’ “Just the Way You Are” and then the words flowed onto the page and she won the fellowship. 

But it didn’t happen like that. Instead, I said something, that I am going to withhold out of discretion. I really did think it might work, what I said, the way I tried to re-frame her thinking about her personal narrative. 

It didn’t. 

Even the coolest, grittiest, most adventurous and self-confident, and capable people have that nerve that makes them collapse in on themselves, and somehow I twanged that exact nerve in her. How disappointed I was in myself that I’d made this person, this literal cowgirl, I so admired, sit across the desk from me and cry. 

What’s worse: I couldn’t find a way to make it better in that moment. The meeting ended. The essay was unresolved. I wondered if I’d lost my friend.

But Andi’s ahead of me. She figured it out–herself, her essay. She realized what I couldn’t quite put into words properly. She recognized that personal essays are all about the arcs in your life. 

So she read through old journals and she identified the arcs in her journey–from a ranch in Wyoming to college in Maine then down to South America. She figured out the parts of her that remain rooted and the parts of her that wander. She figured out how to balance a life that epitomizes Americana with the passion she’d developed for the Spanish language. And she figured out to express enough of that so the fellowship committee got it. And when she figured out how to do that essay, I too finally figured out how to do that essay. 

Six months later Andi was graduating. The night before the ceremony she turned up at my house. My in laws were visiting and together we shared mountains of Thai food. “Andi’s the friend I’ve been telling you about. She won that fellowship to live and teach in Ecuador next year. And she’s meeting me in Kenya next week.”

It was true. One week after graduation, Andi was going to meet me in Nairobi, then we would travel together to Mombassa to meet up with a mutual friend. 

“I can’t go to Kenya with you!” Andi had told me a few months earlier. 

“Why not?!”

“It would drain my savings!” she said.

“Eh, whatever. Money’s for spending. When else will you have a friend invite you to Mombassa and have another friend go with you?” I replied.

She bought her tickets a couple of days later. 

The trip defies summary. We saw the red dust-coated zebras and giraffes and elephants of Tsavo national park. We watched the moon rise over the Indian Ocean. We floated through mangrove forests and braved the East African Railroad nicknamed the Lunatic Express. We visited schools, we walked down beaches, we ate street food, and we reveled in the music of The Head and the Heart. On the return journey layover, we walked around London in what felt like a dream. 

They say shared experiences are the foundation of the best relationships, and I’ll be forever grateful that Andi sacrificed her savings account so that we could take that trip together. 

That trip changed me. I had traveled before plenty but mostly to English-speaking countries and mostly to Europe. I hate to say it but when I was in college I couldn’t conceive much of a world beyond that. And that’s one of the many gifts I received from working at that college, was meeting so many young people with curiosity broader than I could have previously conceived. I feel like on that trip I learned to see a broader spectrum of life on this planet. I loved The Wizard of Oz as a kid, and I felt like I had taken my own out of my sepia-toned world, but unlike Dorothy, the world remained in full color when I returned. 

Less than a year later I spent time abroad with Andi again when I visited her in Ecuador. As a kid, I had a second-grade teacher who ditched the typical barnyard animal-type elementary school lessons and taught us about the savannas of east Africa and the Amazon jungle in South America. After our time together in Tsavo, I knew who I wanted to go with to the Amazon rainforest, and Andi arranged it all. We met in Quito and then flew out to eastern Ecuador where we took a long and winding bus ride up to a branch of the Amazon. From that roadside dock we traveled for a couple of hours by motorized canoe through the dense jungle to a lodge. As we sped along the riverway chatting Andi would occasionally chat with the guide. I watched as before my eyes my friend shifted in and out of Spanish. How was she doing that, I remember wondering. Like I got it, she studied Spanish and lived there, but as someone who never really mastered, or even intermediated, any language I was genuinely astounded at how my friend could move so smoothly between both linguistic realities. I might have learned four or five words that trip, but not much more than that. But I had a new appreciation for that old chestnut about how languages can open the world up to you. 

A little while later I had the opportunity to visit another Spanish-speaking country, Mexico, for a conference by the fellowship organization that had supported Andi on that year in Ecuador. I eagerly accepted the invitation. Andi had also been invited to attend that conference but by that time she was working full-time as a Spanish teacher in Boston, so I went on my own. Whereas my time in Ecuador was largely spent in the rainforest, this trip to Mexico was spent entirely in the city of Puebla. I remember having this funny feeling walking around Puebla like I was finally meeting a whole branch of the family to whom I’d never before been introduced. As a Yankee with French and Anglo heritage, I knew well the English and French branches of colonized North American culture, but had little to no context on the Hispanic, let alone indigenous, branches of the continental culture. I remember that trip feeling a little indignant, a little angry. How had I gotten to be almost thirty and was only now getting to know this side of the family? That trip I picked up a couple more words of Spanish and told my husband what a great trip it was, and how wonderful it would be to visit again sometime. 

Years passed. Andi figured out from a bag of Cheetos that I was pregnant with our third baby, a discovery that earned her godmother status. A few more years passed. A pandemic happened. The world of study abroad got hit early and hard. Same for international fellowships. The world I’d taken just joy in helping others explore, the exploration of which had propelled my academic and personal development for two decades, was shutting down. Now I realized how depressed I became, cut off for goodness knows how long from travel. Work felt less meaningful, constantly affected by viral whims. In May of 2021 I took some time off. My husband, the kids, and I took the biggest trip we could at the time and drove down to Cape Cod and stayed in a hotel preserved in an eternal off-season status by the virus. May in New England is still awfully nippy, so the kids and I spent most of our time in the indoor pool. I felt panicked. For the first time in my life, I didn’t want to go back to work. It was too heartbreaking semester after semester to deliver last-minute changes to college or government policy. It just didn’t feel worth it spending all those hours all summer to help students apply for fellowships that last minute lost their funding due to the virus or a reduction in funding. Besides, I’d spent all these years helping young people have international experiences I hadn’t even considered doing in college. And I began to wonder, is college really the only time to go abroad? To learn about another culture or represent your own? What if my kids could learn before their late twenties about how big the world is and how much bigger still it gets when you can speak another language? 

So while my kids played and my husband had meetings on zoom in the room I called Andi. “Would it be crazy if we–me, the kids, all of us–moved abroad for a year? Maybe learned Spanish? Do you know anything about this? What do you think?”

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I was working with a client the other day, someone who spent decades running the performing arts program at a Wisconsin public high school. In the piece she’s developing she refers often to her loved ones, a group that she writes includes family, friends, and “former students.” I paused on that last category, reveling in knowing how special that group can be to folx such the two of us who’ve been privileged to work with students. But unlike the known categories of “friends and family,” society at large, and Hallmark in particular, doesn’t seem to make much of the mutual impact and importance made upon the lives of both students and educators alike. 

As I write this I find myself choosing my words carefully, reminding myself it seems at each clause not to use the word “relationship” or “love” for fear of giving the wrong impression, the only impression it seems that’s commonly available for the closeness that can develop between educator and student. So the relationship (dang it, I forgot not to use it) is either nothing at all, or it’s over the line. And of course, both of those exist; but so does a middle ground. 

For over a decade I felt enormously privileged to be in that middle ground of meeting smart, interesting, good-hearted people from a variety of backgrounds when they were my students and forming enduring friendships with them. And I know few educators, or at least few passionate educators, for whom this is not true also. 

My 12 years spent at that college gave me some of the most important people in my life. I could have happily spent this time writing an essay about Andrew or Chase or Amanda or Ben or Kate or Eleanor or Sam. 

But Andi is the person I text at my happiest–and my saddest–the person who texts me after listening to every episode of this podcast, the person I know I could be happy spending time with on any continent, the person who is always out ahead of me but still trusts me to give her my opinion about life and dating (though maybe not money). Not everyone has a friend who is ahead of you, someone who sees it first that you’re worth being friends with. But when you find that person–learn from them, show up for them, be vulnerable with them, adventure with them, and make up silly nicknames for each other–it’s just the best. 

What’s more, Andi is a teacher herself. The kind of teacher who makes a lasting impact on her students, the kind of teacher who has supported her students through the worst events life can throw at them, the kind of teacher who proves to students that school isn’t just about learning but it’s about community and taking care of each other. 

On that trip to Kenya we traveled so well together, especially in contrast to the mutual friend we went to visit who kinda ditched us, we started referring to each other as GLP. GLP stands for Great Life Partner. One birthday or Christmas Andi sent me a framed picture of the two of us in Mombassa, with G-L-P in oversize orange letters glued onto the frame. 

I notice that as I write this essay I’m smiling. Often when I write my mouth is kind of scrunched up, an inadvertent expression of self-criticism. I enjoy writing complex personal narratives without undue heed to a central character or chronological order to a simple theme. 

But sometimes a personal narrative doesn’t need the form to be fancy, because it’s not about the form and it’s not about fancy. It’s about appreciation and love, and enjoying finally getting it down on paper because you’ve been meaning to all these years how much you admire and value someone. 

Thank you Andi for being my friend. You mean the world to me. OK the pod is over now–you can text me!

Love, Nargaret