I yelled down the hall from the study: “Come see! You’ll love this, come quick! Hurry!”
She, doing kitchen things in her kitchen, called back to me at my keyboard, “What is it?”
“Just come down here, come now!”
Outside the window of my little study, the hollyhocks had grown to be 5- or 6-feet-tall. Their stalks, festooned in showy flowers, had attracted the attention of enormous bumblebees — bumblebees with abdomens so large they looked cartoonish, pulling down the flowers as they lazily and loudly buzzed from one to the next.
“Be there in a minute,” I heard as she dismissed my urgency with her distracted tone.
I just wanted to share a small happiness.
I had been in deep thought for a long time over being betrayed by a false friend. I had been played, as they say in modern terms. Played like a trout on a lure of deception. Ah, the friend who is a friend only so long as they can use you. A friend they are, only as long as you are doing them favors.
They “don’t count favors,” of course, because they don’t do any. Takers never count favors, and they try to shame you into not noticing a strictly one-way street.
What kind of world is it that is populated by self-serving mercenary people — and fools like me? Is everybody out strictly for themselves, strictly to obtain leverage over others?
I’d seen it before. The selfish users of others trick earnest folks with their words. They paint pictures of the kinds of shared experiences and outings that friends have, false pictures. Such alluded-to fine friendship never seems to happen. It always boils down to what you can do for them.
We’re all happy to help a friend, at first. Then over time, vague uneasy feelings of foolishness arise. The one-sidedness of effort is brought up after two or three months of you giving and them taking.
“Well, I don’t count favors,” the user will sniff, trying to shame you back into providing effort and resources for them. You feel a fool but try a little longer. You want to be sure things are as they seem. Yup. They are.
I was in a funk for weeks after this particular experience. I’m not one to give up on humanity, but I sure felt raw. Is anyone really a friend? Do we all just look out for our own interests, extracting favors, time and work from others? Hard for me to deal with the world when my fundamental optimism is so shaken by such a parasite, a user.
I’d been wrestling with such thoughts and trying to get some work done when I’d gazed out the window and seen the ebullient flowers and the ponderous, methodical bumblebees.
“Come see! You’ll love this!”
“I know,” she says from the other end of the house, with happy notes of kindness in her voice. “I know what it is and I know why you want me there.”
Like the false friend, it seems she is a plotter. She has observed and figured me out. But the information discerned has been used in an entirely different way, to be thoughtful, to be kind.
“How could you know,” I ask as she comes, finally, laughing down the hall.
“I planned this three months ago! Hollyhocks are tall, showy flowers that I knew would grow tall enough to be seen out your window. Our prairie bumblebees are rather predictable. I knew that you’d be up with the sun, writing, and you’d gaze out the window lost in thought. I knew you’d notice and in the noticing, call me to come see. I know my flowers, I know my bumblebees, and I know you!”
Months of plotting and for such a small and incidental happiness? What sort of person would do that, get pleasure from that kind of plotting and planning? A true friend would — a genuine friend that sometimes puts me first.
Such a small thing, really. So small that it’s incredibly large and real. Only my old Valentine would do such a thing.
To be held in the heart of another and valued for who we are, to know such richness of being, we must be the holder to become the held, in turn. Even the false, in their crooked, hollow way can point the way to appreciating what it is to be fully human.
Tom Preble lives, writes and gardens in El Paso County. Reach him at lvranch@att.net.
