my mom and all her friends have been reading this book by this lady, and my mom thought that i would really like one of the little essay things that made up the book. it was called "flip-flops, girlfriends and levi jackets". and its really good. i thought i would copy some of it in here, because it really does speak to the nature of girls and the way that we all interact as friends. so here it is.
Flip-flops, girlfriends, and levi jackets
Three things never fail a girl: old levi jackets, flip-flops, and girlfriends. Armed with these, any situation can be weathered, if not with grace and aplomb, at least with a modicum of comfort and hope for the future.
Flip-flops are comfortable, pack well, and come in all colors. Like the rattle of a diamondback, they warn people of your approach. Levi jackets are imbued with a soul of cast iron; they never wear out. The older they get, the better they are. A weathered levi jacket adds a touch of devil-may-care humor and solid practicality to anything from a swimsuit to a prom dress.
Girlfriends I discovered rather late in life. The reason it took me so long was the Myth.
Our society, like a thousand others, is pervaded by myths, things so woven into the cultural mind-set we no longer know how they began, subcutaneous “truths” that get under our skin from the minute we’re born and by which we live as we grow.
One of these myths is so obviously untrue its enduring nature amazes me. The Myth that the only good friends, I mean really good friends- the kind you can trust utterly and depend upon in a crunch- are men. Buddy movies, coming of age stories, and pals-till-the-end war movies have touted the unbreakable bonds between men. Women, on the other hand, are portrayed as petty: they squabble, stab one another in the back, and will abandon one another at the drop of a man.
What a crock
In my idiosyncratic and totally unscientific research into the matter, I hve discovered women are the arbitrators, protectors, creators, and healers of friendship. If there were a god of friendship, she would be a goddess.
Women create friendship opportunities for their children, suggest dinner parties to get to know their husbands friends, make sure the kids are connected to grandparents, aunts and uncles. It’s women who remember birthdays, weddings, bat mitzvahs and First Communions. They inspire, create, and maintain the friendships for the entire family.
But most gloriously, they are friends with other women.
, I spent much of my youth clinging to the tenuous amnesty from femaleness that my father so generously granted the women of his household- as did my mother and sister. I learned to drive tractors and shoot. I wore levis and boots. I scorned women. I prided myself on being “one of the boys”. I boasted the I liked men better than women, that my best friends were men. At parties I fled the “coffee klatch” in the kitchen to join the fascinating world of men around the bar-b-que.
What saved me from this pale and desperate charade, oddly enough, was golf. When I entered my thirties, the men in my circle became infected with the game. After one too many bogeys and birdies, I began slipping away to the women’s side of the room.
A new world opened up. Women were nothing like I’d been led to believe. They were honest and funny and interesting. Topics of conversation were not only more varied than those I’d grown accustomed to but went deeper. We laughed more. A lot more. I began making women friends.I discovered women call each other on the phone for no reason, meet for coffee, lunch, movies. They shop together for the hell of it, visit each other’s houses simply to have company while cleaning out the attic. In troubled times, women rally around, support, take up the slack. Women share. Everything. It’s what they’re programmed to do. Maybe its evolution: while men were out hunting the mastodon and thinking of the dance they’d do around the fire that night to boast of the heroic encounter, women were in the cave, and it’s damn sure they were talking. If either gender can be credited with the creation of language, it has to be women. Women talk.
A marvelously insightful fellow said something to this effect: “Men talk about three things: money, sports, and sex. They exaggerate how much money they make, pretend to know more about sports than they do, and lie about sex. Women talk about only one thing: sex. And they never lie…”
Occasionally we do talk of other things besides sex, but we seldom lie. Oh, we lie to our bosses, our mothers, our husbands, children, loan officers but not to each other. To lie to a girlfriend is simply missing the point.
Girlfriends don’t love you because you are good or rich or beautiful. They love you because you’re you, because you love them. They love you because, in the face of adversity, you hurl yourself facedown and cry; “I can’t go on!”. Then you get up and go on. They love you because you go to church in Sunday like you ought to. They love you because instead of going to church on Sunday like you ought to, you stay home and stencil leaves on the bathroom ceiling.
When you love him, they love him; when you hate him, they hate him. When you love him again, they kindly forget you ever said all those awful things. Not because you are right, but because they understand. Women are born into a support group. All we need do, it seems, is embrace it.
Girlfriends are warmer than levi jackets, stronger and can take you to as many places. The older they get, the more comfortable they are. They keep you warm, keep you fashionable, keep you from being too vain while letting you be as silly as you need to be. Like flip-flops, they can walk through mud with you and emerge undamaged, make you laugh when all else fails, and keep you from taking yourself too seriously.
Maybe women developed these complex and life-affirming ties to better care for our children. Perhaps it evolved because it was the best way to get the work done that needed doing. Maybe we clung together to survive emotionally in a male dominated world. It might be an evolutionary trait to better the chance of offspring surviving.
Or, could be, it’s a gift from God because she likes us best.
