Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

friendship and race

Friendship Is a Rare and Precious Gift

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When she called to say they’d be stopping by for a few minutes on Labor Day, I didn’t give it a second thought. Deidra and Harry often pop in for a quick visit. After eight years, these friends are more like family now. We’ve vacationed together, shared dozens of meals together, worshipped together, grieved together, and celebrated birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays together.

So when they sat on our living room sofa that Labor Day and told us they were moving 1,500 miles away, I admit, my world turned upside down.

They didn’t stay long. I waved from the front door as they walked down the driveway, and then I turned to my husband and burst into tears.

I cried off and on for three days. And when I wasn’t crying, I was surprised to find I was angry. Turns out, I’d written a whole story of the future of our friendship in my head, and suddenly, there was a whole new plotline.

Frankly, I didn’t much like this new story. I vacillated between resenting Harry for accepting a new job halfway across the country, shaking my fist at God for writing a plot that didn’t match mine, and mourning what felt like the end of a friendship I treasured.

Deidra and I met online eight years ago. I don’t remember who stumbled on whose blog first, but I do remember it didn’t take long for us to realize how much we have in common. We are both writers. We are both transplants to Nebraska. We both have two children. We both love dogs, the beach, and shoes.

As the months and years passed, we moved from the light conversations of a beginning friendship into deeper terrain. Deidra is black and I am white, and in the early days of our relationship, I was keenly aware of our cultural differences. But because we grounded our friendship in what we had in common and allowed our relationship to grow naturally at its own pace, we were later able to step gently into the places where we are different.  We didn’t always share the exact same viewpoint, and that was okay. We gave each other space and grace.

Last week I stopped by Deidra and Harry’s house one last time. The moving truck stretched along the curb out front. The rugs were rolled up in the living room, and there were boxes stacked in the corner. Deidra and I embraced in the empty dining room, but with the movers bustling about, there was, thankfully, no time for tears or dramatic goodbyes. “See ya,” I said, waving as I walked out the front door.

Still, last Saturday I awoke with a pit in my stomach and a lump in my throat, knowing Deidra and Harry had departed Lincoln earlier that morning, bound for their new home in Connecticut. All day, as I went about my chores and errands, I felt a heaviness in my body and heart that I can only describe as grief.

The truth is, I still don’t like this new twist in our story, because I know that, in some ways, our friendship is bound to change. Yet I also know that the reason I feel such sorrow is because Deidra and I have something rare and precious. Friendships like ours only come around once or twice in a lifetime, and not even 1,500 miles between us can get in the way of that.

This article ran November 4 in the Lincoln Journal Star.

 

Why Building Bridges Doesn’t Happen Overnight

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I’ve been running a new route these days, not because I want to, but because my typical trail is closed due to construction. The bridge that spans the trail I usually run has been demolished and is being reconstructed.

I don’t like my new route. For starters, it’s longer. And it also includes the addition of two hills, whereas the trail I usually run is completely flat. Plus I’m forced to run along the road now, jumping on and off curbs, navigating a sidewalk that’s full of potholes, cracks and fissures. I miss the familiar, smooth path through the quiet woods that I know so well, I could almost run it blindfolded.

Progress on the new bridge is slow. Yesterday morning I stood behind the orange striped blockade and surveyed the construction, bulldozers lumbering up mountains of gravel, men in dirty jeans and hard hats yelling orders over the roar of machines. I noticed that after three months, the new bridge is still barely a scaffold. I wondered if the bridge would be done by the end of the year. I wondered if it would ever be done.

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My friend Deidra and I first met five or six years ago. We became acquainted online first, tiptoeing our first tentative steps toward one another in the blog comment box. A couple months later on a frigid winter night we recognized each other at a local coffee shop, just from our tiny profile pictures on our blogs. A few weeks (or maybe it was months?) after that we met for lunch. I was early; she was a few minutes late. As I sat on a bench in the restaurant’s foyer I worried that she’d had second thoughts. Later, over our sandwiches and salads, she peppered me with questions, like an interview. I think we were both a little bit nervous.

I was unsure of myself in this new friendship. In a lot of ways forging a new friendship is like dating. You want to make a good impression, woo the person. And in this case, with Deidra and me, it felt a little bit trickier, because I am white and she is black, and for me, this was new ground.

I’m embarrassed to admit that Deidra is my first black friend. I don’t even like the way that sounds, but frankly, after typing and deleting, typing and deleting, I don’t know how else to say it. I’ve been acquainted with people of color here and there throughout my life, but friends? The kind of friend who knows you inside and out — your secrets, your flaws, your gifts, your fears? Never. It seems, for someone who is 45 years old, for someone who graduated from a university with 26,000 students, for someone who calls herself liberal, progressive, open-minded, that this shouldn’t be the case. But it is. And so for me, this new friendship was something different; it was new terrain, a new path. It felt a little bit like building a brand-new bridge.

I’ve made a few blunders along the way, like the fact that I’d assumed Deidra was white when I first “met” her online – I thought she was Italian, from what I could tell from her tiny blog profile picture. Years later, when I finally got up the courage to admit this out loud to Deidra, she acknowledged it without judgment and with so much grace.

I’ve made other assumptions that have all turned out to be wrong, as assumptions usually do. The first time I visited her church (Baptist), I assumed there’d be lots of Amen-ing out loud and hand-raising and ladies bedecked in fancy Sunday hats. Apparently, at least with regard to fashion, I conflated Baptists and the Kentucky Derby.

I’ve also said the wrong things from time to time; I know I’ve questioned, “Should I have said that?” I know I’ve hesitated, second-guessed things I’ve written in emails or said out loud. I’ve stumbled through voicemails and Voxer messages, stuttering and stammering and then hanging up and thinking, “Well that was exactly not what I wanted to say.” It hasn’t always been pretty and neat, at least on my end.

In the early months and years of our friendship Deidra and I stayed on safe, neutral ground. We talked about blogging, writing, shoes, books, kids, food, sometimes about faith. As the years have passed we’ve eased into conversations about race and other more challenging topics slowly, little by little, over time. These conversations have gotten easier, more natural and comfortable as we’ve built this bridge bit by bit on a foundation of mutual respect, trust and love, on a foundation of real friendship.

Building bridges in relationships (especially with those you might consider different from you), just like building actual bridges, takes time. It’s slow work. Sometimes it’s hard and a little bit gritty. Sometimes you might even have to take a detour, the longer route full of cracks and fissures and potholes. For a long time, you might wonder, as you look at the heaps of dirt, the foundation of the bridge barely laid, if there’s been any progress at all.  You might wonder, as you stand there surveying the scene, if the bridge is really ever going to be finished, if the two sides will ever really connect.

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Yesterday morning I stood behind the construction sign and observed the concrete, the steel girders, pilings and beams, the rebar that will lay hidden beneath the pavement, a tapestry of metal that will hold the whole structure of the bridge in place. I watched the crane and the bulldozer, saw the dirt, mud and dust, the piles of debris. It didn’t look like much yet, but the longer I stood there, the more I knew, the more I could see what it was all becoming.

As I stood behind the construction sign with my hands on my hips, I saw the beginnings of a bridge that will span a gap. I saw the future. I saw what the slow but steady progress and the hard work will build. I saw that two sides will come together, the gap will be bridged, and what is created in that process will be strong, stable, beautiful and new.