Friendship is difficult, like love

This post is dedicated to Mrs. Mizzoni and Mrs. Garwood

Mrs. Mizzoni

When I was a child, my grandmother's friendship circle had dwindled to basically one friend each. My Grndmother Lavinia Lyons lived in a brick row house on 10th Street in South Phiadelphia and her neighbor, Mrs. Mizzoni was her friend. My grandmother didn't go out very often, and when she did it was mainly because one of her daughters came to pick her up and take her to the Oregon Avenue Diner for lunch, or to go shopping. This Grandmother had long thin white hair which she wore in a bun at the vase of her skull, and she had a soft white face creased with many wrinkles and networks of thin threadlike lines and faded sad blue eyes. Grandmom was sad, and a bit of a recluse. She had a son around the corner and down twp blocks on Johnson Boulvard and he dropped in to visit her every day after work. He was sad too, maybe the human condition, maybe an inherited melancholy.

I never really saw Mrs. Mizzoni; she was a character in my grandmother's daily life narrative. When I visited, if we were sitting on the enclosed porch, which I loved, she would say, "we have to go inside, Mrs Mizzoni is coming." I had the impression Mrs Mizzoni was a pest, but as far as I know, my grandmother's only friend and I feel certa on the porch or over the hedge border in that they visited with one another on occasion and shared grievances about members of the family and life in general.

My Grandmother's Lyons house was perfectly tidy and dusted at all times. It was beautifully furnished to my child's eyes with real lace curtains in the dining room and a gleamingly glowing dining room set with upholstered seats. The Liing room had a Victorian sofa and black flocked wall paper splashed with red satin roses which I was admonished not to rub with my grubby child hands. At the top of the stairs to the second floor and the three bedrooms and bathrooms hung . a reproduction of a Rembrandt potraint with the metal helmet of a warrior. My grandmother would say "See my Knight? His eyes, they follow you everywhere." that was to warn me that if on the way to the bathroom, I decided to rub the deep enticing black velvety wallpaper or the satin red rose, the Knight would see me. Beyond that my imagination didn't go, as to whether he would tell her or if she saw me through his eyes. I just kept my hands to myself. Our

There was a small china cabinet with some of my Grandmother's treasures in it. Prominently stood the tall pale bluish white chocolate pot with the blue trim. I loved that coffee, tea, chocolate pot. I never knew it was a chocolate pot until after I bought my house and my grandmother gave it to me as a house warming gift. On the bottom was imprinted "Made in Occupied Japan" and that was when she told me it was a chocolate pot. I had never seen anyone drink anything from a pot but coffee or tea. Another thing about that pot is that my Aunt Susan, three years older than I and as crazy as a fairy tale character also loved that pot and coveted it. To my knowledge, however, she didn't harbor any rancor against me when Grandmom gave it to me.

Our neighborhood in South Philadelphia was a social deomographic portrait of immigration in the Colonies. There was the ghostly remnants of Stonehouse Lane and the earliest German occupation of which my paternal ancestors were descended, then along the Delaware River the FIRST settlers were remembered in the Gloria Day, "Old Swedes Church" our family church built in the late 1600's by Swedish settlers. If you walked from my neighborhood belong Oregon Avenue, up Broad Street, you could see the sedimentary waves of immigration in the professional names on the brownstone buildings: Irish (after the potato famine of the mid 1800's) and Italian after the first World War, they were the predominant cultural group when I was growing up. My block of Warnock Street had a scattering of Irish families, the Taggarts for instance, and one or two German families like the Hauser's, but the rest were all Italian and the cultural context was entirely Italian built around Stella Maris Church. All the restaurants were Italian and the Itaian festivals were celebrated with parades and street fairs, braided palm wreaths on the doors at Easter, and the Italian Market up a ways on 9th Street which was as though you traveled to Europe. People spoke in Italian as they shopped in the open air street market for produce and meat and cheeses. The meat from shops were animals were butchered right on site and rabbits and ducks and chickens hung in the windows, crabs and eels scrabbling to get out of the barrels in which they were imprisoned on the sidewalks.

Mrs. Garwood

My other Grandmother's best friend was Mrs. Garwood. They lived next door to one another on 6th and Asbury Avenue in Ocean City. I always saw My paternal Grandmother Mabel, talking to Mrs. Garwood over the back yaard fence. That back yard being at the seashore, was all sand with some stiff and rough patches of sea scrub struggling for an existene here and there.

Mrs. Garwood I can picture so clearly. She had the face of a soft sculpture, or child's stuffed animal of a camel, beige and fuzzy with a silightly cleft upper lip. She too had the soft blue faded eyes of the old,, behind her glasses, and the short permanent wave pale gray hair of the period. She was soft spoken, too, and patient and watchful as I recal from my encounters with her. She was small. I don't know how old these women and my grandmother's would have been at the time. Let me think, if I was generally about 10, my Grandmothers and their neighbor lady friends would have been in their late 60's or early 70's. They all dressed the same, light weight silky dresses with a thin belt at their plump waists, tied black shoes with a Cuban heel, stockings (worn my my Irish grandmother rolled down around her ankles) and often both Grandmother' would have been wearing aprons, cotton with a bib top that had an oval cut for the neck and pockets in the lower half where for some reason, I seem to always remember clothes pins.

Grandmom Mabel was very different from Grndmom Lyons she was outgoing, cheerful, hearty and very social She belonged to a movie club and attended the Village Theater on the boardwalk regularly. She also attended the Women's Democratic Party group. Grandmom Mabel also worked. In summer she worked selling tickets from a booth at the amusement park on the 5th Street end of the boardwalk. My brother and I got free tickets to ride the ferris wheel where we leaned perilously out to grab the metal ring from the clown. In winter, she worked at Stainton's Department Store. Both work places were an easy walk from where she lived which wa a second floor apartment rented from one of her sisters sisters. I remember Grandmom talking to Mrs. Garwood, whom she referred to and addressed simply as Garwood, over the back fence. I don't know anymore what they talked about but I am sure they had more topics of conversation than my Philadelphia Grandmother. I didn't know until decades later that Garwood was actually a family name from my mother's side of the family.

I was thinking about friendship and old women because I had recently sent a card to an old friend of mine from whom I have been estranged since the Covid epidemic 6 years ago. We often had disagreements being of much different personalities. If I had to simplify it, I would say that two of my closes friends with whom I have had disagreements are Beaurocrats and I am a Bohemian. Our disagreements seem to fall into arguements where they fall on the side of the authorities and I fall on the side of the individual. For example the above-mentioned friend of whom I was very fond, fell into disagreement with me over a racial conflict - the George Floyd incident.

A Black man was killed by police in a confrontation when he had been confronted in the parking lot of a fast food establishment where he had either fallen asleep or passed out. The police killed him. They had killed several Black men recetly in the public view thanks to cell phone video and journalists follow-up, so protests broke out all over the country. With the protests in Philadelphia, I was on the side of the protestors "Black Lives Matter" activists and protestors and my lost friend was adamantly and angrily on the side of the police because opportunists had used the protests as a way to loot the stores on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. My old friend and I had both been raised in Philadelphia and both had loving and affectionate memories of the City. She also felt that the poor should be forced to hand over the money that was being distributed as Covid relief to the landlords to whom they had not been paying rent. I felt they should use the money as they saw fit to meet their own personal needs. We had argued over these kinds of things many times but recently I had become more inclined to argue back rather than to shrug it off and let it go as her personality. Also she had frequently referred to me as "Jack of All Trades, Master of None." This was because she felt I had too many interests and that if I narrowed it to one, I could ccomplish something. I argued back for once that I was accomplished at all my interests: three college degress all with honors, three books completed and independently published art work in several shows concurrently. We were both oldest of five and she was immensely competitive, so I think this final argument was more than she could bear so she wrote me a "poison pen" letter going bak decades, detailing everything I had ever said that she found hurtful and she demanded my response. My response was no response. We drifted apart. I discovered a few years later she had been moved into a memory unit at a senior living complex and her house had been sold. That whole world of our long friendship was gone.

She had hired me for my first job out of college into a library program in a nearby town and we had been in a writing group for 30 years together, listening to one another's essays and short stories. Her Ogden Street stories had become a part of my own memory of life as a child in the city of Philadelphia, even more interesting because she was 12 years older and her stories covered the War years. This year I began to miss her. I wrote her daughter - no answer. I sent my old friend a card. So far no answer, but it made me think about friendship. As you get older, your friend drift off and die and if you are lucky you make new ones, but one thing you learn is that you must accept your friends in their differences and you must seek common ground because your friendships may no longer be made over shared interests but more over geographic access. My newest friends lives near me and one lives not to far and used to ive near me. Also two new friends are from my attendance at Quaker Meeting, only one lives near me. In fact, I think I will call her now.

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com