Being close friends with someone for 43 years must count as some kind of a marriage.
I met Deni in the summer of 1968 when she walked into the music store I worked in. I was immediately struck by her appearance because she looked like a female John Lennon. Tall and somewhat lanky, she had shoulder-length hair that parted in the middle, and she wore wire-rimmed glasses. She carried herself with an assurance and confidence I’d never before encountered in someone my age. She handed me an acoustic guitar that needed new strings, I think, or maybe she just wanted someone to tune it, I don’t remember. Whatever it needed, I did it and we spoke a little about music and who our favorite songwriters were.
A few weeks later, on the first day of school, as I stood outside Russian class waiting for the teacher to open the door, Deni rushed up to me all smiles and exuberance, asking if I remembered her. Of course I did, and as we talked, we discovered we’d both signed up to study Russian. What are the chances? It was a small class and a huge student body.
As we talked, more similarities revealed themselves. We were both newly transplanted from small towns, and we knew no one. Our musical backgrounds were similar, and the houses we lived in had the same floor plan—we lived in the same neighborhood, only a block away from each other. We were both Libras, I a September and she an October, and she had a Lennon edge I respected, while I had a Donovan gentleness she admired.
I really didn’t want to make friends with anyone. I was very happy to be out of the small town environment I’d just left, and I was ready to float through my senior year as a solitary, mysterious folksinger, free of the complications of friendship and invisible in the crowd. When this charismatic, intensely brilliant girl accosted me outside the classroom, I wasn’t sure I wanted to pursue any kind of relationship with her. The next thing I knew, she was standing at my door in bell bottom Navy dungarees and a crocheted poncho, beads hanging around her neck and her guitar in hand. It didn’t take her long to win me over. She knew songs by Peter, Paul & Mary, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and, better, she compared me to Donovan, Arlo Guthrie, and Joni Mitchell. Flattery will get you everywhere.
With your fist thrust in the air,
And your John Lennon hair;
And your circled glasses,
That’s how I best remember you…
How many evenings did we sit in each other’s bedroom sipping Constant Comment tea and playing songs, both together and for each other, while incense cones sent ghostly shadows up the wall? How many weekends found us in coffeehouses and at folk concerts? How many chords did we teach each other, and how many tea bags did we go through?
With Deni’s advent into my life, everything changed. I’d met a fellow folkie who encouraged me to nurture that side of my creativity (everyone else wanted me to be a pop singer). My songs changed, grew deeper and more introspective. I began writing about art museums and beaches, and wooden stiles by the windswept Highway 1 that curved and climbed along the California coastline.
When she began attending classes at a local college after graduation, I tagged along in my suede fringe and paisley, and we became active in protests and rallies. We marched in the national Vietnam Moratorium together. I brought my guitar and we led many choruses of
I Shall Be Released and
Come Together that day.
Not long after that, I decided to hitch-hike to Haight-Ashbury, and it was Deni who dropped me off at the Ventura Freeway entrance. As I got out of her VW bug she asked,
“Are you sure you want to do this?” God! How many times have I wondered how my life would have turned out had I said,
“No, let’s go back to your house for a cuppa and a ciggie.” It was a major crossroads in my life, and I can’t say I made the correct decision, but what the hell? What’s done is done and that was a long time ago.
We’ve been through a whole lot of life both together and apart, and we've surmounted some of life’s cruelest attacks. She helped me through widowhood at the age of 18 with a 2 week-old baby and I helped her when her 18 year-old daughter died of preeclampsia in the final weeks of her pregnancy in 1991. Deni was at my house for the weekend when her husband called to say he’d found Nicki dead on the bathroom floor.
And my twelve-string guitar,
Planning to take me far;
With all the years before us,
Do you really think we ever knew…
Deni never recovered from Nicki’s death and in a very real way I lost my friend that day. Still, we remained close. As I watched her slowly lose the will to live, which resulted in two decades of illness, I already knew that I’d never get my old friend back. I stood beside her though, even when it was difficult. Why? Because I knew she’d do the same thing for me if the tables were turned. That’s what friendship does. I never judged her, never told her to pull herself together, and I never said the most hurtful words of all,
“Life goes on, get over it.” For her, life may have gone on, but it was a life she just couldn’t seem to grapple with.
The young woman who’d so tirelessly thrust her fist into the air was defeated. The gifted mind that wrote, directed, and acted in plays got lost in the television. Drapes were never opened, dust and cat hair collected on retired volumes of literature and philosophy. Her guitar sat unused, the strings brittle from lack of resonance.
In January, Deni was diagnosed with cancer of the liver and, as I write this, she is making her journey to the other side; she is not expected to make it through the next 24 hours. In my heart I know that she will soon be reunited with Nicki, and I receive comfort knowing that the emotional and physical torture she’s been through the last 20 years will be turned into joy, but you know how it is for those of us to must remain awhile longer. But ours is one of those friendships that no matter how many years pass between our visits, we always pick up right where we left off. I have absolutely no doubt that we’re going to have a wondrous reunion the next time we see each other.
We are water,
And the river keeps on flowing,
We are water,
And the love, it keeps on growing.
We are water,
We are water.
_____
UPDATE: Deni passed at around 11:30 am PST.
We Are Water © SK Waller 1983
