Not last summer but the summer before, my friend Sarah came to visit. She stayed for three days, during which time we knitted, chatted, played with the baby and ate lots and lots of latkes. This would not have been strange at all, but for the minor detail that we'd never met. I'd read her blog, she'd read mine, we'd emailed, and eventually we talked on the phone. Our husbands thought we were nuts. "What if she's a serial killer?" her husband asked. "What if you don't like each other in person?" mine asked. I'm not, we did, and I'm still trying to get her to come back.
I'm thinking a lot about blog-based friendships now, because I just checked one of the knitting blogs I read and found that Brynne's lump is benign. And I was immensely relieved, because it had been worrying me all week, such that I was checking her blog almost hourly to see if she'd posted. Last May, one of my other blogging friends died of cancer, and the experience of writing her last few posts for her is not something I want anyone else to have to go through. (And I still can't get TypePad to take the thing down. Support? What support?) I'd never met her either, despite fifty billion emails and however many phone calls and pieces of physical mail.
Blogging is so weird. It's opening your life--only as much of it as you want to share, but still--to anybody who cares to read about it. I have about ten blogs I read regularly. Some are knitters, some are Jewish, some are both or neither. Some of them are just really, really weird; some of them are people I think I'd love to be friends with. And some of them are people I have become friends with, through a comment turned email exchange turned what I can only term a real friendship, even though the two of us are states away.
Strange thing, isn't it.
4 comments:
It is...and I found yours by reading Sarah's...Sarah who was raised maybe 25 miles from me I discovered. Ah, the intertwinings of the web (pun intended).
Strange, but kinda beautiful. I've only just started meeting up with web peoples instead of lurking shyly around their sites, and I've met some lovely folk because of it. Funny to think even twenty years ago, none of this would be possible.
It is odd. My husband thinks it's weird that I get 'addicted' to certain blogs and count these people as friends - when we have never met in person.
One of my best friends in the entire world is half a country away...we have never met in person - but we have been through so much together - how can you not count them as a friend??
I hope to meet her in person this summer.
I read cancerbaby too. I'm sorry that you had to be the one to tell us. Thank you.
I find it a variation on penpals. I wrote to a girl (who then turned into a woman, as I did) in Germany for many years before I finally met her. When I saw her waiting at the train station, I knew her instantly, and we were as comfortable in person as if we had been in class all those years after all. I have another friend in Finland I haven't met yet, and one in northern California I hope to meet soon, and I've written to both for years now.
I hope one day we'll meet, you and I. I think we're becoming friends, and that pleases me very much!
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