Their Friendship Is Letter Perfect

I turned 40 in February. Another milestone reached, and Kay reached it with me.

Kay. Like a guardian angel, she’s been with me in the joyous times as well as the difficult ones.

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I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am to hear your news. At our ages we begin to expect losses in the family, but hardly someone of our own generation! What a tragedy to lose someone so young. . . . I’m glad to hear that you’re beginning to recover from the initial shock. It’s going to take a long time to work through that much pain.

--In a June 1988 card upon hearing of the death of my brother at 27

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She was there when, at 16, I got my driver’s license. She cheered when I received my diploma from La Puente High School in 1975 and saw me through two more graduations--from Cal Poly Pomona and Stanford University.

She was thrilled for me when I married a co-worker at 27, and sympathetic when I went through a painful divorce nine years later.

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Pat, you should know that after 20 years you can write to me about anything. . . . We’ve seen each other through some really crummy times on both ends. I hope that you’re closer to sorting all of this out. I hope you know that whatever decision you reach, you will have my utmost support.

--1993 letter after learning of the separation from my husband

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For nearly a quarter century, Kay has been my friend and confidant, and I hers. Yet, for all these years, we have never been in the same room together. We have never met, nor have we ever shared a conversation over the phone. Kay Elizabeth Lowell is my pen pal.

Well, she’s not exactly my pen pal anymore. Technology being what it is, she’s now my e-mail buddy.

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Happy, happy, joy, joy. . . . I’m so thrilled to be able to get ahold of you this way. As you will find, I’m much more communicative online than on paper these days. Since I am required by my position to monitor (and sometimes contribute to) a number of library-related discussion lists, I’m online every day. At least three times.)

--1995 e-mail message after Kay learned she could contact me via e-mail

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This unusual friendship began in 1973, when an ad in Teen magazine caught my eye. The magazine offered to match up its adolescent readers with pen pals. It would base its pairings on such important compatibility factors as age, astrological sign and favorite color.

This 16-year-old Aquarian with powder blue eyelids and midnight blue eyelashes received the name of her pal in the mail: Kay LaVoie, 16, a Libran whose favorite color was (and still is)--you guessed it--blue. She lived in Canaan, Maine, 2,600 miles from my San Gabriel Valley home. Maine. Wow. That’s the other side of the world, I thought. It will be fun to get to know someone who lives so far away.

In those early days of our relationship, we exchanged letters at least once a month. We shared news of high school proms, college applications, dates and boyfriends.

I told her what it was like to be shaken up by the Sylmar earthquake (and later the Whittier quake and the Northridge quake). She wrote to me of her adventures snowmobiling in her backyard and going cross-country skiing.

A few years later, we began to correspond by tape. I heard her impressions of Maine-landers (“I’m gettin’ the hosses outa the bahn. Ayuh”), and I did my rendition of the Valley Girl (“Gag me with a spoon!”). She treated me to tunes on her guitar that she had sung at her choral recitals and endured my disco phase, which is now in its 24th year.

After Kay graduated from Colby College in Waterville, Maine, she did stints as a high school English teacher, a shoe store assistant manager, a paralegal and a legal secretary. Her companion through all of it was Nate Lowell, whom she married in 1985.

A year before her marriage, while working as a legal secretary, she felt a sharp pain in her right wrist. Within days, her hands were useless. This was at a time when carpal tunnel syndrome wasn’t well accepted as an occupational injury. So began years of hell for her, as she went on workers’ compensation, endured months of physical therapy and lost jobs as her hands continued to give out on her. In 1987 she received a legal settlement and a year after that emerged from a depression with a decision: She’d go to library school.

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One of the important things about our friendship is that during all those years when you were career-building and I was struggling to make a new start, depressed and with no accomplishments to show, I never once felt pitied, condescended to, anything of the sort. It really meant a lot.

--In a January 1997 e-mail message

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Today, Kay is an assistant professor of library science at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, only 850 miles away from my Lakewood home.

Over the years, the letters and tapes have come less frequently. Sometimes we’ve gone a year or more without communicating. Nevertheless, I knew our friendship hadn’t ended. Usually, after a long lapse, one or the other of us would start a letter or tape: “You had probably given up hope of ever hearing from me again.”

The differences between us are many. Kay, of French and English descent and brought up Baptist, was one of three children. I’m a Mexican American, one of eight children brought up by Catholic parents. Kay’s idea of a grand vacation is bird-watching along the Eastern Seaboard; mine is sipping Mai Tais in the eastern Caribbean.

What’s the secret of our enduring friendship? It could just be that not meeting is what has kept it going. Maybe this friendship is better suited to distance. Perhaps if we both lived in the same area, we would have discovered long ago that we had little in common and might have let our friendship lapse.

Kay summed up what makes our relationship so special in a recent e-mail message:

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I think that we’ve had, and continue to have, a great friendship--at least as close as some of the others I’ve had with people I’ve been near to.

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I think the distance factor sometimes actually lends itself to--what’s the best way to put this--unburdening ourselves to each other. I mean, you say what you say and there is no immediate feedback either negative or positive; we don’t know each other’s friends, so it’s completely safe to tell each other our innermost thoughts.

***

You’re much more into night life and glamorous trips to fun places and I’m just as inclined to go to bed early with a good book (you might find me incredibly boring in person, who knows!)

So I guess what I’m saying is that even though I hope we get a chance to meet one of these days before we’re both old and gray, not meeting hasn’t dimmed our friendship in the least.

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Well, we’re too late for the old and gray part, but she’s right--our friendship is as bright as ever.