Nava at Easy Speak

April 2022

Every word she writes swims into metaphors and begs to be contradicted or proved untrue or worshipped.

That’s what she says, my lovely friend, and what am I writing about here? I’m writing about surprise and newness and vaporizing ideas that I’ve held for so long they smell kind of musty. I’m writing about my fear of being an old person, not a person who’s lived a certain number of years but an old person. Someone who does things because she’s always done them and doesn’t do things because she’s never done them and thinks things just because she’s used to thinking that way.

The catalyst for all this is Nava, a most unexpected friend.

The thing is, I’m friends with her grandmother and that makes it sound like I’m really, really, really old. I hurry to say, Wait! Her grandmother’s fifteen years older than I am. Then I can pretend I’m nowhere near old enough to be someone’s grandmother—and hope that you believe me.

Hadiyah and I wrote memoir together every Tuesday at my studio in the U District, seven to ten PM every single week for ten years.

Time goes by and I’m reading with some writing buddies on Zoom one night and there’s this name on the screen I’ve only ever seen once before, but it belonged to a little baby. Hadiyah’s granddaughter, Nava. A little baby…how long ago? Oh, right. Fifteen years ago.

A message in the chat box and sure enough, the beautiful young woman who writes fabulous poetry is that former little baby, and we like each other’s work and soon we are friends. One day we have lunch, all three of us in Hadiyah’s cottage on Queen Anne. We are eighty, sixty-five, and fifteen, writers and friends.

I’m working on my blog, a pretty thing that’s been sitting online untouched and a secret for two and a half years. I mention it and Nava gets excited. She talks about the internet, how great it is that you can access it from anywhere. Anywhere! It cracks me up that someone who’s grown up with the internet gets so excited about it and I start to get excited, too. I do want people to see my work from anywhere, of course I do.

There are buttons at the bottom to share on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I shudder. No, not the masses, anyone and everyone able to see my precious work from anywhere! She gives me a funny, quizzical look and my old person alarm goes off. I smell dust and mold, I wrinkle my nose and change my mind. OK, social media. And nothing bad happens. No trolls appear, escaped from the ranks of Q Anon, no lightning bolts strike, I feel no queasiness in my stomach. Everything is fine.

Weeks go by and Easy Speak is meeting in person after two years on Zoom. Nava and I are both on spring break and I’m in Seattle already, and we want to go and read. First we find a coffee house where we can write and edit. It serves boba tea, which I have never heard of. Is it the same as bubble tea, that stuff with the tapioca in it that looks possibly slimy? I hate slimy things… But OK, I’ll try it. In my cup the little beads are black and nobody can tell me why, but still I slurp some down. It tastes earthy, a nice balance of bitter and sweet. And slimy in a good way. We write and sip our boba tea and shut the place down.

We wind up in Starbuck’s with our laptops and lined pads, and along the way I learn about another new thing: Monopoly for Cheaters. When I finally stop laughing I ask what it is, and is it real? She says it is real and it’s real chaos. No rules. You roll the dice and move as many spaces as you want, and when someone’s not looking you can steal their property or rob the bank. If you get caught you’re sent to jail, slapped in handcuffs, but you can escape if no one’s looking. Lawlessness, how shocking. But I wonder, if there aren’t any rules then you’re not breaking any rules, so is it really cheating?

Easy Speak meets in an alehouse tonight and Nava and I have cooked up a plan to smuggle her in/use her sister’s old ID/or…something, we’re not sure. We’ll think of something. It has all the caché of an old spy movie or a jewel heist (or Cheaters’ Monopoly), ‘til we find out she’s actually allowed. There’s no bar in the room, so minors are OK. I’m not corrupting the youth, only giving a friend a ride to read our work. The soundtrack of spy music fades away.

It’s time to head over there and I’m wondering how to end this story. I’m stumped ‘til I realize maybe it doesn’t end, really. Because if writing is anything like life there aren’t many neat and tidy endings, just places you decide to stop. The buzzer goes off and your five minutes are up and then the people clap and you’re done. At least for the moment.