Let me move this down for you.
OK, is that working now?
Yeah.
So I do the central essay in this book
called-- the book is on friendship,
and I'm not going to read the whole thing.
I'm just going to read some excerpts from it.
I had a friend who, at a very sad time in my life
was more or less my only friend.
And she was sad too.
And she was a dog.
She was not my dog.
I had never had a dog.
I knew nothing about dogs.
I had heard they were man's best friend,
but thought that was sentimental and without weight.
My friend belonged to a very young couple.
Too young to be a couple, in my opinion,
who lived in the apartment below mine.
They fought all the time, especially at night.
They screamed and hollered at each other
and sounded a lot like an old married couple who fought.
Which is why I thought they were way too young to live like that.
My friend, the dog used to visit me
when her parents, masters, owners fought.
I would hear her scratching at my door.
She couldn't bark because her vocal cords
had been removed by her original owner, parent, master.
Her hips had been damaged in an accident
and she wore a brace around her hind.
I could hear her scratching at my door with her front paw
and I would let her in.
Together, we would sit and listen to the fighting
coming up through the floor.
She would be trembling and I would put my arms around her
and we would stay like that for the longest time.
I always had food and water for her.
She knew right where they were on the floor.
And since at that time I myself was
eating very little on account of my sadness,
I would eat a little something from my cupboard when she ate,
so we would eat together and hold each other.
And then her master, parent, owner
would holler for her to come down and she would go.
I would hold the door open for her,
and she would turn one last time to look at me before she
limped down the stairs.
She could not bark or whimper or make the least sound.
I loved her.
One day I put a silly cardboard frame over her head
so that it sat on her neck and framed her face
and I took her picture.
The whole thing lasted no more than a minute.
And today, 30 years later, her portrait still sits by my desk.
I know she is dead, but I don't know
how the last years of her life turned out.
One night, the couple had an explosive fight.
My friend came upstairs to sit with me, and in the morning
her mother, owner, master packed the car
and left, taking my friend with her.
I didn't hug her or pet her, I just looked at her
and walked inside.
If she had anything to say, she couldn't say it, nor could I.
But I could cry.
And that was a blessing.
Now, when I think of dogs, I understand
that their relationship is very sentimental
and carries great and lasting weight, like any friendship.
[APPLAUSE]
I had a friend when I was 10 and she was a Mormon.
We played together after school and on the weekends.
And one night her mother invited me to stay for dinner.
It was a large family and they sat at around table.
And when it was time to say grace, each one of them
folded their arms in front of their chest, like this.
Folded their arms in front of their chest, which startled me
as that was something my mother did when she was angry
when she stood in the kitchen and let you know.
We said grace in my family, but we folded our hands together
and bowed our heads, and no one could ever tell who was angry
and who was not.
When I ate with my friend's family,
I thought they were all angry with God and it confused me.
Why would you pray when you were angry with God.
I was too polite to ask my friend why Mormons did this.
So for a long time it stewed in me.
I had another friend at that time.
And she was also Mormon.
And one day, she took me to her basement
and showed me what her family kept down there.
Huge burlap sacks of lentils and beans and rice.
She said this was the food her family would live on when
there was an apocalypse.
I asked her what an apocalypse was.
She said it was an event that would cause the whole planet
to explode and burn.
I did not understand why anyone would
want to survive such a thing, but was too polite to say so.
And then I remembered the Mormons were angry
when they prayed.
And why not?
They had to survive in ashes and live on beans.
Suddenly, I understood and things began to make sense to me
at the age of 10, thanks to my friends.
[LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE]
I had a friend in high school who was not my best friend,
but she lived closest to me in the city
and it was easy to walk to her house on the weekends.
She lived in a house and I lived in an apartment.
Her family was sophisticated in ways that
were new and mysterious to me.
Her father, I found out years later
was a CIA agent whose cover was working as a cultural attache
with an emphasis in Asian art.
These were the days of Vietnam, as we refer to them now,
which sounds so peculiar in retrospect,
as if a fad for straw or silk had swept through the country.
My friend's mother came from a wealthy Southern family
and had once been a professional ballerina,
a fact that deeply impressed me as even my English teacher--
and I excelled in English--
told me I was a klutz without a single bodily grace belonging
to any of the nine muses.
He had been watching me through a classroom window
as I tried on the court below to hit a tennis ball.
Later, he went so far as to insult my clothing,
telling me to my face my dress was ridiculous.
And so it was, a brown shift with huge turquoise polka
dots, a Peter Pan collar, and a big floppy bow.
My sister had made it.
She made all my clothes.
We weren't allowed to wear pants to school.
My friend's sister took fencing lessons in a white bodysuit.
She had a saber and a grilled mask.
It was all too much.
My friend had several fur coats that
were so odd and interesting you couldn't guess what animal they
were made from.
I joked once that she was wearing her monkey coat.
It occurs to me now that it probably was a monkey coat
as monkeys can be found in all the Asian countries
her father supposedly was collecting
the antique heads of Buddha in.
So that was the situation.
My mother adored my friend.
She liked my friend better than any of my other friends.
Because when meeting my mother for the first time,
my friend actually curtsied.
I think my mother had waited her whole life for that moment.
My mother loved fruit.
I think she would as soon have married a pear as my father.
There was always a big bowl of fruit in the kitchen,
liver spotted bananas, and green grapes as translucent as jade,
though, if I ate the grapes, the arthritic stems
that remained terrified me.
I imagine them as crippled hands coming to get me.
And there were always apples, her favorite.
In those days, there weren't kinds of apples.
You couldn't say, I feel like a Gala
or pick up some Granny Smiths.
There were only, well, apples.
They were red, all shaped the same and perfectly tasteless.
My mother kept another bowl of fruit in the dining room,
and all of that fruit was artificial.
When I was younger, it was plastic.
But by the time I was in high school,
it had all turned to bone china.
In my mother's mind, there was a very big difference
between a plastic orange and an orange made from China.
And if you couldn't tell the difference,
you had no taste, none at all.
It was the difference between a handshake and a curtsy.
Years and years later, I wrote a poem, and in the poem
are the passing words a world where no one ever even
curtsies anymore.
And I have noticed through the years
that many readers want even demand a back story to anything
that is ever written.
And now I have given them the entire back story
of these fleeting words.
And I feel for a moment like my friend
who curtsied in front of my mother, something my mother had
always wanted and got once.
When I walk through a city, I see
many strange faces and those none leave a trace.
I know they have friends.
Who are their friends?
Whose friends are they?
For wherever I walk, images of my friends go with me.
I have a friend who used to be a dancer.
She once choreographed and performed
a dance I have never forgotten.
She danced to Al Green singing how can you mend a broken heart.
She was solo on the stage and a spotlight
followed her as she moved.
She was wearing a paper bodysuit.
And as she moved, the paper tore, at first,
in tiny slits at the seams and then
in big gashes rip after rip until she was dancing
in shreds, practically naked.
It was so bold and beautiful and sad
and happened once and once only.
It was something to behold.
And then it vanished from the Earth.