Accomplishments of 2022: Making Friends!
Image 1: the front page of The Daily Camera, featuring Michael and myself in the act of accidentally crashing a local election watch party and making friends.
I've heard it said that it’s notoriously difficult to make friends as an adult. Without the scaffolding of school, where do you meet people your age? This wasn’t a problem for me during my six years in Houston. When the higher education system spat me out, it spat me to Texas, where I immediately moved in with seven other people about my age for a year-long volunteer service corps. Whether or not we were friends, per say, they occupied enough of my time so that making other friends wasn't a concern. (Just kidding. We were totally friends.)
Thanks to an impulsive New Year’s Resolution, I took up Argentine tango in 2017, which delivered me into a secret world of stiletto heels, black-and-white checkered floors, swooning bandoneon music, and a corset of wild and whimsical dancers who number among some of my closest friends to this day. When Michael and I met, I promptly introduced him to the art form and its local acolytes (as in, I literally highjacked the second half of our first date to go to a milonga [a tango social dance] and Michael was brave/determined enough to tag along). We luxuriated in the tango scene for a while.
But then the pandemic happened, and all the social dances and the dinner parties and the late-night excursions to taco trucks dried up like streams in the desert. I paced our Houston apartment in my maroon slippers, watching my social sustenance wither and fade.
And then Michael got a job in Boulder. When we moved in May 2021, we thought we were in the last stages of the pandemic, but I’ve since learned that "the pandemic” is just shorthand for one’s personal experience of the pandemic. For Michael, whose-pandemic-related work-from-home period lasted a mere two months in spring of 2020, [his experience of] the pandemic was brief, almost chimerical. For others, including individuals who are immunocompromised, the pandemic has settled over the landscape like a film of grime that may never wash away.
Boulder presented a new challenge: how to make friends in a new/old place without the structures that facilitated it elsewhere. And in a place still sort of impacted by pandemic protocol.
For a while, we subsisted off low-hanging social fruit (but just because these friendships were easily accessible doesn't mean they were any less sweet or nourishing). My lifelong best friend Hannah lives one town over, so she and I settled into a summer routine of study dates and making good use of her buddy pass at the gym. My brother, Grant, lives only a mile or two from us, so he started dropping by after work. We’d bike together to concerts at the bandshell downtown. I reconnected with hold friends from high school with whom I hadn’t been close in a decade. When one of those friends invited Michael and I to a new Dungeons & Dragons campaign, regular role-playing became a beloved new ritual (even if it takes place in a decaying wasteland).
But was relying exclusively on friends from the past, I worried, a form of regression? As a whole, our move to Boulder felt a bit like taking my twenty-eight-year-old self and contorting back into the shape and spaces I occupied ten years ago. Underneath my skin hummed the question: how do I move forward?
Early last month—the first Tuesday of November—Michael and I went to happy hour to celebrate turning in my Master’s Thesis. (Surprise! More on that elsewhere.) After splitting some of the best food we’ve had in Boulder (shout out, Jax Fish House on West Pearl), Michael suggested we stop by a new cocktail bar. When we walked into The Velvet Elk, the bartender looked us up and down before letting us know we probably couldn't stay.
“The place has been rented out for some kind of party.”
“What kind of party?” Michael asked.
“Ask them,” the bartender said. He jerked his chin toward a cluster of white-haired Boulderites.
I sidled up to the cohort of organizers. Over the course of the evening I would come to learn that the room was crowded with local political elites—former mayors, university regents, agitators—but for the time being, they were the people I had to please to gain access to the party. As delicately as possible, I asked what cause brought them together.
“6C,” one of them said. This year the ballot was jammed with contentious local issues, and these people knew each one by number.
“The library district?” I guessed.
“CU South Annexation,” a bearded man replied.
It became apparent that we were both locked in the bullfight-like dance of trying to assess the other’s vulnerabilities without revealing our own. He wasn’t going to give away anything. And I was the one at a strategic disadvantage.
“Which side are you on?” I ventured.
“The good side,” he barked back. One of the former mayors—a tall woman with a white-blond pixie cut—had mercy on me.
“We are in support of the annexation agreement proceeding as planned,” she explained. “But since the ballot measure is to repeal the agreement, our stance is No on the measure, No to the repeal, No more delay.”
An effort to move forward that was circuitously delayed? I could identify with the frustration in that.
From left: Campaign Manager’s tall husband, myself, and Michael scrutinizing early election results
The party had free food and free t-shirts, so Michael and I ordered a round of drinks from the now-gregarious bartender and settled in. While we hobnobbed and studied the early results, we we’re photographed for the local paper and chatted up the vivacious, curly-haired campaign manager and her very tall husband. We loitered in the rental bar until I started to get tired, so we exchanged numbers with the Campaign Manager just for kicks and left to walk to Michael’s car.
On our way to the parking garage, one of the folks from the watch party passed us and said there was another party around the corner at the Rio. Curious, we ducked into the second party, only to find that it represented a bundle of intended outcomes, one of which opposed the stance of the first party. I moved to make a quick exit, but Michael spotted a straggler who’d also drifted over from The Velvet Elk, so we made our way to her: a petite woman with a doe-colored mullet. She wore a dinosaur-print sweater under canvas overalls and was chatting with a dark-bearded man with an accent.
They’d sort of stumbled into the parties too, they confessed. Amir, the man, said he tried to stay informed about local politics. Rachel, the woman, said she lived in the mountains and had come into town hoping to find a watch party focused on the statewide races.
“Colorado’s such an interesting state for politics, with the liberals around here and the conservative evangelical contingent centered on Colorado Springs,” Rachel said. I looked at her sharply. She said that with the intimacy of someone who knows the power that emanates from conservative Christianity.
But I was tired. Before long, I motioned to go. Amir stopped us.
“I meet cool people all the time at concerts and stuff,” he said, “ and we always say we’re going to hang out, but we never do. So: dinner party! This Saturday?!”
Miraculously, we were all free. Five days later, Rachel, her husband, their friend Stephanie, Amir, and his wife all descended on our house for dinner and drinks. Amir brought his homemade wine and Rachel brought vegan desserts. Rachel and Chad swapped stories with Amir and Robyn about their respective interviews with immigration, since one of each couple came from outside the U.S. Robyn regaled us with the tale of her catholic interviewer’s confusion that she could be a Latina jew and Amir, who is Honduran, grew up on a communist atheist kibbutz in Israel.
Partway through dinner in our living room, Rachel admitted to what I’d suspected since her scrap of political commentary: she and Stephanie both grew up evangelical. Since then, they’d distanced themselves from the faith of their parents.
“What’s, like, the least you can do to still please your parents?” Robyn asked. Judaism is a religion of mitzvot—the commandments, or good deeds. That is, Judaism is a religion of practice, whereas evangelicalism is a religion of belief.
“Nothing,” Stephanie answered. “If you don't believe in the right way, there’s nothing you can do to convince them you’re okay.”
There’s something to say for the gift of friends who have known you forever: the friends you don’t have to tell about your weird upbringing because they were there for it, or the friends who witnessed exactly what an awkward geek you were in middle school and love you anyway. And there’s also something, though something different, to say for the friends you make in the later stages: the friends who see you first the way you are now, and you get to fill in the blanks that lie behind.
We stayed up late, laughing and divulging secrets and drinking Amir’s homemade wine. And in the morning, Michael and I got up and fixed coffee and some of my oldest friends came over and we gathered around the table in the basement and played D&D for hours.
Being adults, living in Boulder, making new friends and keeping the old: it’s been a good year.
Whether you’re an old or new friend, I’d love for you to come visit us in 2023! Drop me a line and we’ll set up the guest room for you. Love, McKenzie
