Close To Home;In Dance of Friendship, Waltzes Get Harder to Come By
MY 5-year-old daughter, Rebecca, found a new friend last spring, in the last  few weeks of preschool. Evidence of her feelings first emerged as she sat absorbed at her small table, turning out letters to her classmates on construction paper. She painstakingly copied from her class list the names that  she had come to cherish: Maggie, Jeremy, Allegra, Max, Camille -- children she has known for half of her sweet, short life. Though the lettering was crude and sometimes backward, the feelings were forthright and true: "DEAR MAGGIE, I LOVE YOU. REBECCA R."
Among the letters was a growing pile for one boy.
Why so many for Max?" I asked.
"Because his name is short," was her sensible reply.
The next morning at school, she headed directly to the table where Max was drawing dinosaurs. The smile they shared was so genuine and full of affection that I felt my own heart swell.
I remember what it was like to rush headlong into friendship as a child. I wish it were that simple to make a friend as an adult.
I first moved to New York with my boxes of books and spindly houseplants because I had friends here, and they had friends. We dropped in on one another,  toasted new jobs, went to movies, shared summerhouses. It was pre-"Seinfeld," but Seinfeldian nonetheless. But one by one, then two by two, most of them left  the city, seeking space, safety, trees. They remain friends, but the dailiness, the closeness that comes when lives intertwine, slips away.
Finding new friends is not so easy. As Christina Ricci says to Bill Pullman,  who played her father in the movie "Casper," a "guy your age is more likely to become a bank hostage than to make new friends."
In a romance between mates, the markers are clear: a date, a kiss, family introductions, living together, joint Christmas cards, marriage. If the sequence fails to progress, you move on. But the signposts that a friendship is developing are less clear. Work, spouses, money and pasts all tangle the connection. We become Charlie Browns, wary of rejection but still harboring the  flicker of hope that makes us run at that football. If the person holding it doesn't yank it away, if the foot connects, maybe the ball will soar and a friendship will grow.
My friend Sarah, whom I've known for half my life, has a job now that brings  her to New York every few weeks. I keep a set of sheets for her, and unfold the  living room couch when she comes. We get takeout, don nightgowns early, catch up on life and play goofy games with Rebecca and her 3-year-old sister, Julia. We call and miss Sarah's own two girls, home in Annapolis. Stu, the lone male in our apartment, is easy with Sarah, who came with the marriage. Still, the girl vibes soon prove too much, and he retreats to the bedroom.
Sarah and I met in college. I was a shy, awkward East Coast girl who read a lot and played field hockey. She blew into our dorm, late for freshman orientation, no parents in tow, from exotic St. Louis. She sang, drank bourbon and spoke French. I adored her immediately.
Our lives have crisscrossed over 20 years and thousands of miles. When I moved to a strange city, she hitched a ride across several states to make sure I wouldn't spend my 19th birthday alone. After she moved across the country, I flew out to greet her first child.
"I have a new friend," Sarah confided a few months ago. She told me about Blair, a woman she met at church and who, like Sarah, thrives on rambling conversation and potluck suppers. Wistfulness is not a word that describes Sarah, but there was a trace of it in her voice. "I hope it works out," Sarah said. I hope for her that it does, too, but with a wistfulness of my own -- that Sarah's family and mine live too far apart to have those suppers together.
Being a parent adds more steps to the dance of friendship.
"Hello, this is Jan, Rebecca's mom?" I identify myself tentatively over the phone to a mother who could become a friend. Like me, she works, and like me she's older than many of the other mothers. It takes months before we drop the suffix, longer still before we're comfortable enough to call without a child-related reason. We go to a play together. She and her husband invite Stu and me for dinner, without the kids. The relief and delight of liking, and being liked back, is euphoric. We have more in common than just our children.
Will we worry together about our parents as they get older? Will we survive our daughters' adolescence together? Can I count on her, as I do on Sarah and a  few cherished others?
Rebecca likes to make signs. One on the door of the tiny room she shares with her sister reads OPEN . When she and her classmates graduated from preschool last spring, they looked puzzled to see tears in their parents' eyes. I ache to  think that the dailiness of their lives together has already begun to fade. But  they have practiced opening their hearts, and reminded me how it's done.