In conversations with people, they will make reference to their "good friend so and so". Sometimes they'll say their "lifelong friend so and so". That description of a friend as "lifelong" has always mystified me. In this world of change, turbulence, indifference, and aloofness, this notion of having a lifelong friend seems almost impossible.
When I was in New York City attending graduate school in music, I had the good fortune of finding a great apartment on the upper west side in a phenomenal building overlooking the Hudson River. I had my own room and private bath and no rent to pay, even the use of a Steinway grand piano! The catch was that the apartment was owned by an 88-year-old woman who was practically blind. She needed someone to live with her who could do the grocery shopping and cook the evening meal. That was it (she had a maid come in every Monday to clean house!).
Her name was Juliette and I flew to New York to interview with her a couple of months before I started graduate school. We met in the afternoon; she showed me in to her parlor. Now Juliette was legally blind. She had lost her vision due to glaucoma and would walk down the long hallways of her apartment with her hands outstretched against the walls for balance. She wore thick glasses that made her blue eyes seem huge against her pale small head.
We had a great conversation. She asked me about my music and my family back home and what my plans were with my career. I don't remember asking that many questions; she was talkative and told me about her last "girl" who lived with her, and what the duties would entail and so on. She also told me that she had a reader and a secretary and a maid and three sons and three husbands. All I knew was that I liked this spunky old gal, and that apartment was great. I left hoping I would be the one she would select from the streams of mature (I was 28 years old) college students she was interviewing.
Later that evening I was having dinner at my Aunt Nancy's house in New Jersey and the phone rang. It was Juliette. She said she liked me and trusted me and would like to invite me to live with her. I was ecstatic. I said yes immediately and danced for joy.
There were no applications to fill out, no background checks done, no reference sheets to submit. Just two women 60 years apart who knew they found something special. Juliette operated on trust and intuition tempered with years of experience. I just went with my gut. And so we laid the plans for my move to Riverside Drive.
Two months later our friendship began. I got to know her needs, her quirks, her schedule. She got to know my recipes, my school friends who would drop by, and my reactions to life in New York City. Every night after dinner she would like me to read to her from the editorial columns in the New York Times. Even our political philosophies were in agreement!
Juliette was a great liberal from way back. Born in South Carolina in 1899 and moved to New York in 1902, she marched in the Suffragette Parade down Fifth Avenue when she was eleven years old. She was one of the first women to learn to drive. She once said she learned to drive when New York "was a small town". She was Jewish, and a leader in the Hadassah movement. She was an avid reader and led book groups and book clubs in New York for many years. She was a literary critic and drama critic for newspapers for many years, even at the time I lived with her. How does a blind woman do book reviews? She hired readers to come in and read the books to her, and then a secretary to type up her dictated review. Nothing was going to keep this lady down. She lost her first husband to cancer when they were in their early thirties. She was a widowed mother of three little boys.
She remarried a famous New York physician against all odds during the depression. This husband found greener pastures, left her when she was in her fifties, yet in her sixties she married her first husband's best friend. Love was always in her life.
She traveled the world: to Hawaii before it was a state, and to Israel on one of the first airliners - to name a few. She was best friend to the woman whose husband created Father's Day (a Madison Avenue advertising agency's ploy to sell merchandise during the early summer slump). One evening when we were having supper, she told me earlier that morning one of her friends and she went to visit the Whitney Museum. She said she sat down in front of one of the big paintings and couldn't see a thing. She said at that moment she simply thought about all the incredible art works she had seen around the world during her life. She had seen it all.
This Juliette was an incredible find. She was a living lesson for me on how to fashion a life, how to keep giving and growing and learning. She redefined for me what growing old could be like. She showed by example that life is what we make it, and we are in control of fashioning exactly the life that we want. I could go on and on about Juliette, but cannot leave this one thing out. Her first son was a New York lawyer, her second a Seattle doctor, and her third a drama professor. This third one was also homosexual and had a life partner for many years. Juliette accepted her son exactly the way he was, just the same as the others, and even referred to his life partner as her "fourth son". I complimented her on her loving way with her sons, and she said she loves her son with open hands and an open heart. What an example!
I left Juliette after one year to return home. We were the best of friends during that year. Often I would think that at her age she could die any day. Why did she have to be 60 years older than I? Why couldn't we have been the same age and maintained this friendship for the rest of our lives? Why, when friends are so hard to find, does my jewel in the crown have to be so near the end of her life's journey?
We stayed close friends until her death in 1993, six years after the year we spent together.
I was able to visit her for long weekends several times in New York. The day I got the call that she had passed away I cried and cried. I had just visited her three weeks before.
Yes, I have a lifelong friend in Juliette. She lives in my heart and my memories and my life is a reflection of the wonderful lessons learned from a dear friend.
Judith Cataldo ("Jude"), new age pianist, composer and concert performer. Her first album "Improvising Life" was released this year. Tampa, Florida. (813) 237-5236