My friends have always been older than me. I like to seek wisdom from them. My oldest friend is a new one, a 92-year-old Black lesbian that strangers will mistake for my mother or grandma when we are out together. We’ve agreed that she is my New York granny, since the time I will spend back in my hometown is notably finite.

My world is bigger and longer because I know someone who has known more of it than I have. 

M tells me sweet stories of her brothers sitting and listening to Langston Hughes reading poetry in Harlem, back when the neighborhood held those kinds of evenings. She tells me of the white dollar disinvestment, and the subsequent drug crisis that overtook the Harlem she was raised in. In her view, Harlem never really came back. I’m the one who romanticizes what once was and she lets me see it through her eyes anyway.

She teaches me, just by being who she is, how to be a good friend.* 

Lately, our time together looks like Taco Tuesdays, where she orders a second margarita before I do, and is eager to stay later than my sleepy instinct allows. She keeps me young and hip; she likes the events I like and knows about them before I do—the Assata Shakur memorial, Harlem Pride with VIP seats... She loves the same things I love. 

I think I am better because I know M, because I have her. 

Maybe she has given me my conviction about fighting loneliness through seeking connection in community. I spent the last half of last year silently getting through my first-ever-lesbian-heartbreak, and I owe that survival to her company. 

She tells me about her lifetime being a wife, and her lifetime being a widow. We sit in the home they once shared, which is something like an altar to that love now. In the garden under straw hats, she articulates the melancholy feeling of no longer having someone to end the days with, balanced with the gratitude of having ever once had it. I think the love I only ever reached for surely insignificant. She says it once angered her that anyone could think their grief is big, bigger than hers, or big at all, but tells me now that it is all real. 

So I suppose what I am able to produce is more a note of gratitude and appreciation rather than an instructive text. I am a long-term believer in the power and beauty of intergenerational relationships, and this is my example of that.

* Some things M does that we all can take as suggestions against this loneliness epidemic:

Thumbnail image by Tynesha Foreman for Disabled And Here, a “disability-led effort to provide free & inclusive stock images from our own perspective, with photos and illustrations celebrating disabled Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC).”