52 New Friends

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Friend #51 - Keira

December 17, 2018

Keira is a business contact. We had our first phone call more than a year ago. She had just started her job working in the marketing department of an event center and I was the contact on file. There was something about the melody of her voice that made me immediately like her. In fact, I think I may have even suggested grabbing a drink at one point early on…but it was said in passing. I don’t think she took me seriously. We didn’t meet face-to-face until April or May of this year, and it was specifically for business as we sat across from one another in her conference room. We went through the business at hand and when we were almost done, Keira made mention of the fact that she was single. That caught my attention. She is a beautiful redhead. We are close to the same age and neither of us have any children. I’d been wanting to find someone to go with me to social events for singles and Keira was perfect! We scheduled in some time to meet up for cocktails in a Sex-i

Friend #50 - Derek

December 11, 2018

I was picking up tacos for a business meeting. The restaurant didn’t have them ready so I stood talking with the guy working behind the window. He was a nice-looking young man with an easy way about him. I gathered he was the restaurant owner’s son. While we were chatting, I mentioned my mission to meet 52 new friends this year. His eyes widened and sparkled. “I want to be number fifty,” he declared. So, we agreed to meet up for coffee. But in order to understand the son, I quickly learned I would first have to know about the father. Derek’s father grew up in a small, poverty-stricken town in a Mexico. By the age of 6, he was already leading a herd of sheep across the Mexican terrain on a daily basis and working as a sheep herder. His father loved soccer as boy, but there was never any money to buy him soccer shoes. By Derek’s account, his grandfather was an alcoholic. It was a bad situation for Derek’s father so at the age of fourteen, he illegally crossed the bord

Friend #49 - Dan

December 05, 2018

It was pouring rain on the day I was supposed to meet Dan. The small coffee shop I’d picked out was crammed with people trying to avoid what was falling from the sky. Somehow, I managed to claim a small table in the middle of the noisy chaos. I was just beginning to think the timing of this meeting was bad when Dan lowered his black umbrella and walked in. If you saw Dan in a crowd of people, you would probably overlook him, but he has a way about him that took me back to my Midwestern roots, to a time when I only knew people were good, solid and dependable. He seemed to be half man, half twelve-year-old boy, although I’d estimate his age to be relatively close to mine. He’d been sent to me through another friend of mine who told me Dan had triplets. That’s really the only thing I knew about him. He is conspicuously absent on social media. I gave him a minute to settle in and he ordered a cup of coffee, which is apparently a rarity for him. Dan never reall

Friend #48 - Taryn

November 26, 2018

Taryn was a sickly child. Early on, the doctors realized she was allergic to eggs, peanuts and corn. Think about that. Almost everything Americans eat contains some form of eggs, peanuts and corn. And it wasn’t just a small allergy. As a child, Taryn remembers ingesting any form of corn would literally make her skin burn. It was like her body rejected the one thing that would nourish her: food. Luckily, her mom loves to cook. Twenty years ago, there were few options for those with food allergies but Taryn’s mom found clever substitutions. And slowly, the skinny kid became stronger. The food allergies didn’t go away but Taryn learned how to manage them. By the time she was in junior high, Taryn didn’t feel like the sickly kid she used to be…and she wasn’t. Taryn’s older sister had always been in dance so when the older sister expressed interest in belly dancing, Taryn’s mom decided Taryn would also benefit from the instruction…and Taryn loved it! Nowada

Friend #47 - Emily

November 19, 2018

Emily is a good girl. She grew up in a Christian home in San Diego and met her husband while he was stationed there. He’s a small town boy from Missouri. She admits he doesn’t talk very much, as country boys tend to be on the quieter side, but the pair shares the same values. They love Jesus and more than anything Emily wants to create a home that is comfortable for them, their families and their friends. They married when Emily was twenty-three and they tried living in Missouri for a while. Being from San Diego, Emily wasn’t a fan of the humidity and cold winters. Her husband isn’t a fan of big cities, but Queen Creek, Arizona seems to be the best of both worlds. The desert climate is nice most of the year and although Queen Creek does have a lot of the city’s amenities, it is still far enough outside of Phoenix to have ample farmland and horse property that make Emily’s husband feel right at home. For the most part, Emily has a happy life. She mostly ha

Friend #46 - Gigi

November 13, 2018

Gigi wanted to meet up and do something fun so I suggested Rustler’s Rooste, a cowboy-themed restaurant with amazing views. She’d lived in Phoenix her entire life and had never been there. Looking around as the cotton candy and balloon animals were passed from table to table, Gigi proclaimed the restaurant wasn’t a place where a little Mexican girl would normally go. Gigi’s father is Caucasian and her mother is Mexican…but she wasn’t the only person of color in the restaurant that night. I thought the statement was odd. Gigi was recommended to me through another friend. Physically, she is a solid woman but even dressed down in a tshirt and jeans, I could see she had a loveliness buried under a hard exterior. Of course, none of that was my first impression. The first thing I noticed was that when she sat across from me, even though the table was very small, she seemed very far away. I babble when I’m nervous and in an effort to make Gigi feel more comfortable, my chatte

Friend #45 - Sean

November 07, 2018

Sean was one of fourteen children born to his parents. It was a crowded, chaotic household, but it was still filled with a lot of love. When he was a kid, he used to collect bottles from his neighbors so he might be able to turn them in for enough money to buy candy. It was a rather ingenious scheme until his mother got wind of it. She grounded him saying that begging for bottles made the family look poor. But they were poor. There were a lot of mouths in the house to feed. All of Sean’s clothes were hand-me-downs and he was grateful for the half of one drawer he was given to store his things in the bedroom he shared with his brothers. After the stint with bottle collecting, Sean’s mother decided he was old enough to follow in the footsteps of his older brothers and allowed him to take on a paper route. Sean used it, as his brothers had before him, to build relationships with the homeowners and to stake out a market he could milk for a lawn mowing business. If

Friend #44 - Jennifer

November 01, 2018

Five years ago, Jennifer was a music teacher in Indiana who wanted to change her school, but because there were no shortage of music teachers in Indiana, that was a very difficult thing to do. She had just started dating a guy she really liked when she found out he was being forced to relocate to Arizona for a job. Spurred on at the notion of losing the guy, Jennifer looked for a job as a music teacher in Arizona and to her surprise, she found one. The couple continued to date after they both moved to Arizona. Eventually, they moved in together and got engaged. And if the story had ended there, I could have said that was the most daring thing Jennifer had ever done, that she had a nice, quiet life. But these are the times when being a teacher in Arizona has become synonymous with being a revolutionary. Jennifer has seen firsthand how programs have been cut and how students’ education has suffered at the lack of funding in our Arizona schools. What started out as m

Friend #43 – Rayn

October 23, 2018

Rayn warned me she would be coming from a fitness class so she would be hot and sweaty. Wanting to make sure she was comfortable, I got up early and went to the gym before I headed over to meet her for coffee so I could be hot and sweaty too. Her Facebook page told the story of someone with fitness as a core part of their life and when she arrived, she told me she had considered an attempt to look her best, only to realize the sweaty girl with no makeup was more like her than anything else. I admired that about her. I like people with transparency. And so to be perfectly transparent on my part, I admitted that I would only rate my fitness level at moderate at best. The little pillow of fat around my midsection was proof of it. Rayn shrugged, as if it didn’t bother her. “I don’t exercise to get smaller,” she said. “I exercise to be more powerful.” And by the way she moved her arms, I could virtually see the warrior inside of her step out in front of me and th

Friend #42 - Leslie

October 18, 2018

I love it when my current friends refer me to people they think I may like. It gives me a chance to stalk those people a little on social media so I don’t have to worry about lulls in the conversation. Leslie once worked with an old sorority sister of mine so after we set up an appropriate time and place to meet, I got online to check her out. The first thing that jumped out at me was that she works for a school I’d seen on the news recently. Once we’d both grabbed a drink from the bartender, I asked her what was going on. Leslie is the digital coordinator for the school’s online program. She told me that the school rented its building from the Phoenix school district and that the district had suddenly declared they were raising the school’s rent by more than eight hundred percent. Leslie said, her boss, the principal, had been particularly stressed about it and was hoping to be able to reason with the school district during negotiations. The parents were stressed

Friend #41 - Jennifer

October 08, 2018

Jennifer barreled into the Chandler coffee shop full of purpose. After a quick stop to say hello to me at one of the tables, she was off on a mission to get herself a cup of coffee, leaving me trailing behind her to the cashier like an entranced child. After she had placed her order, she asked to speak to a manager. She’s the PTO president for her child’s school and they were scheduled to have a First Responder’s Day on September 11 th . She wanted to know if Starbucks would donate coffee to the event. She’s a tiny thing but she has a remarkable intensity. I immediately adored her. Jennifer explained that her son goes to a local public school in the area. And it’s a nice area! But it is in an older part of Chandler, Arizona, so the school is one of the older schools in the district. It was built in the 1970’s and it is showing the wear and tear of age. In fact, the playground has been ripped out because it didn’t meet current safety standards and because o

Friend #40 - Emma

October 01, 2018

Emma was sitting outside waiting for me at the agreed-upon Starbucks when I arrived and as soon as she opened her mouth, her words dripped with a delightful English accent that she no longer realizes she has. Emma was born in the United Kingdom but her ex-husband’s job was very specialized. They lived in Asia for a while until he was called back to the UK. Then, they were sent to Arizona…and at first, Emma wasn’t sure she was going to like it here. One of the first things she noticed was that Americans were particularly vocal and passionate about their politics. Of course, politics is a topic of conversation all over the world, but Emma was used to a level of civility in those that disagreed that she didn’t find here in the United States. She likened it to rooting for a sports team. It was off-putting. Equally as oft-putting was the American take on religion. She was used to people keeping their religion relegated to their private moments but Americans tend to wear

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