52 New Friends

Strength comes in many different forms.   Amanda was a starry-eyed ASU freshman when a friend of hers asked her to go on a church trip to San Diego.   Even though Amanda had never been particularly religious, a trip to San Diego sounded pretty good to her.   It was on that trip that she met the man she would eventually marry.   He was Russian, here in Arizona on a work visa.   He was fourteen-years her elder and he was deliciously exotic.   Unfortunately, this isn’t a love story. Amanda’s Russian admitted he was really only interested in the church so he could meet girls.   Amanda is a brassy, no-nonsense New Yorker so I doubt she was ever naïve…but at the time, she was young and she didn’t really recognize the power the age difference would hold over her.   She dated her Russian on and off for four years and then when she was twenty-one and nearing her college graduation, she found out she was pregnant.   She had wanted to go to grad school but her Russian wanted to ge

When I first set out on this meeting-new-people adventure, one of my friends came to me and said, “I want you to sit down with Sandy…but she is about to go undergo surgery for breast cancer.   Can you wait a couple of months?” Of course, I could wait.   I wanted to know what it was like to be hit with the heavy weight of a cancer diagnosis.   I had heard that Sandy was doing much better now so when I sat down with her in a Starbucks on a chilly Sunday morning, my first question was ripped right out of an old Tim McGraw song:   “How does it hit you when you get that kind of news?” I was prepared for earth shattering trauma but Sandy just shrugged and said, “I’m seventy.   Things like that are to be expected.”   In a shockingly honest display of her own mortality, Sandy went on to explain that she realizes she is probably closer to the end of her life than the beginning.   And while the burning sensation in her arms is annoying and the hair loss still forces her to wear a wi