Taking solace in friendship during trying times
Every week or so I’ll get an early morning text from Gina.
“Wanna meet at our spot?” she asks.
I’ll fill my thermos with coffee and head to the spot next to the river, where Gina and I will place our chairs six feet apart and settle in. A pandemic week’s worth of pent-up ideas will spill out as we get caught up – on our work as TV producers, on politics, on our families, on masks and germs and bad hair days.
We never run out of topics.
So there we were last weekend – talking, talking, talking – when Gina reached into her bag.
“I brought a list,” she said, pulling out a white card.
In advance of our meeting, she had written a list of topics she wanted to cover. I have been at important office meetings with bosses who weren’t as prepared as Gina was for our little morning coffee clatch. And that, I thought, is why this charming, peculiar, brilliant person and I are friends.
Gina is an animal person, she loves bats; a spider person, gives them names and doesn’t squish or banish them; a person who crochets little hats for stuffed animals; a producer who is always winning big awards; and a beach person. She’s also a morning person, which brings me to the another reason we are friends.
One early summer morning, my instant message kept ringing. Gina was frantic. From her computer back in Pittsburgh, she was watching the hotel camera feed from a beach in New Jersey, and something was wrong.
“There’s an animal stuck in the hotel pool, and it’s trying to get out,” she wrote.
I logged into the camera feed and sure enough, there was a dark something moving atop the water. With the camera at a distance, it was difficult to discern what kind of animal it was.
“I think it’s a duck,” I said. “Or maybe an injured seagull, a squirrel?”
We watched as the critter moved toward the pool stairs, almost reaching the top before floating backward again
She decided it was a sea turtle. An imperiled sea turtle.
“It has agency,” I cried as I watched it struggle.
“Come on, little guy, you can do it,” we shouted, cheering it on as if we were watching the Olympics. But it could’t get out.
“Call the hotel,” I said, but it was 5:30 am, and the hotel was closed.
And so Gina did what nobody else I’ve ever known would do: she called the Ocean City, N.J., police, to report a sea turtle was in trouble. She inquired if they would send an officer to rescue it?
A uniformed officer appeared on camera a few minutes later, but turned and walked away. Gina called back.The officer showed up again, looked at the turtle and walked away. The next call was from the police to Gina’s home phone.
“Ma’am, it’s a balloon,” the officer said. “Stop calling us.”
Yes, that desperately trapped “animal,” whose drama unfolded before our eyes, turned out to be a deflated mylar balloon. Gina and I shared sighs of relief and, for me at least, one of the five biggest laughs of my life.
This funny, wildly empathetic woman had pulled me into a drama 350 miles away. She’s the kind of person who watches beach camera feeds for entertainment; the kind of person who thinks the spiders in her kitchen have the right to be there; the kind of person who writes up a discussion list before a casual coffee chat.
Spiders Bijou and Fresca – and stranded balloons – are lucky to have Gina as their friend. And so am I.