Thank You for Being a Friend

‘These are memories that I’ll wrap myself in when the world gets cold and I forget that there are people who are warm and loving.’ - Dorothy Zbornak

Picture it. Fife. 2019. A baby English teacher hurtling towards early middle age takes his first steps into the world of rented accommodation. Crippled by loneliness, and crushed by the weight of professional expectation, he finds comfort in the unlikeliest of companions: four fictional widows from a thirty-year-old, Miami-based sitcom. What can four old women from 1980s Florida teach a 25-year-old man from Fife, you ask? Let me start at the beginning.

It was a year of firsts for me. My first year out of full-time education. My first year as a teacher. And eventually, my first flat. I had set sail from the safe harbour of my family home and voyaged towards the shiny new world of independent living.

The flat was my second-storey retreat from the world. A blank canvas that I could really put my stamp on. Two bedrooms, a modern kitchen, even a Juliet balcony where I could live out the fantasy of every Shakespeare-loving English teacher and regale the neighbourhood with my favourite soliloquies from Bill’s back catalogue. No? Just me?

Most importantly, it was mine. Somewhere I could go to be alone, swaddled in the amniotic comfort of its beige walls. That was the plan, anyway. What I hadn’t considered, in my semi-youthful naiveté, was the loneliness. I had been so keen to carve out an individual path and create a space that was all my own that I had forgotten that it would actually entail… well… being alone.

Meanwhile, work was no picnic. The first year of teaching is difficult and unforgiving. I’d work stressful eleven-hour shifts trying to meet expectations and fit in with colleagues and listen to an endless onslaught of ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ and the shrill bell screaming out relentlessly, and then return home to –

Silence.

Uncomfortable. Oppressive. Absolute. In time, my modern kitchen started to look a bit tired, my Juliet balcony started to look a bit vertiginous, and my blank canvas started to look a bit empty. A camping chair and a tiny TV were hardly the sophisticated single living I’d dreamed of. I’d find myself coming home to an empty house, working until the early hours, and too busy to see friends. Wracked with doubt, I started to question all of my choices.

Enter, The Golden Girls.

I’d heard of it, obviously, but I’d immaturely written it off as a show about old ladies. More fool me. This show was about to become my lifeline in choppy waters.

After a particularly awful day, I returned to my sparsely decorated abode. I’d made a sad little dinner, sat down on my sad little camping chair and watched something on my sad little telly. As the show faded to black, the first episode of The Golden Girls began to play and, too lazy to peel myself off the verdant canvas to fetch the remote, I watched it. In moments, I was immersed in the outrageous lives of Dorothy, Blanche, Rose and Sophia, and my grey world was transformed into glorious technicolour.

On paper, this was a mismatch. I wasn’t a menopausal widow navigating the trials and tribulations of learning to date again in my fifties. Our experiences were wildly different. But amid a personal storm, I’d washed up on a sunny Florida beach and found that their Miami home felt like the most stable place in the world. These fictional women were the reliable presence I desperately needed, and every time the theme song began to play, it was like slipping into a welcoming hug.

Before long, I was obsessed, and my late nights were accompanied by tall tales from Blanche’s questionable Southern upbringing; my nagging doubts were assuaged by Rose’s sunny outlook and stories from ‘back in St. Olaf’; my stress was eased by every comically pursed lip and raised eyebrow that Dorothy’s face produced; and my fears were calmed by watching the zany schemes that Sophia enacted from beneath her (dreadful) wig.

‘But it’s a sitcom!’ I hear you roar with pitying laughter. ‘How can a sitcom compare to a real human connection?’

It can’t. Obviously. But what’s a friend if not someone who cheers you up and is there whenever you need them? Someone you learn from, grow with and are comforted by. At the most challenging time of my life, I wrapped myself in the Chanel-scented embrace of these women, and my outlook was all the better for it. So what can four widows from 1980s Florida teach a crisis-ridden Fifer? Rather a lot, as it turns out.

The life I live today is worlds apart from the life I lived back then. I’ve settled into my career, moved house, made wonderful new friends and forged a meaningful relationship. Yet even with all of these positive developments, life is life. You make mistakes and fall flat on your face with frustrating regularity. But the balm that soothes the scars, and the resilience required to climb unsteadily back to my feet, is still in the gift of those four wonderful women, whose love and humour provided comfort at a time when such blessings were in relatively short supply.

Nowadays, the show is no longer a ritual. The sassy jokes no longer provide the background noise to my domestic life, and the theme music no longer punctuates my days. But every so often, on occasion, I switch on the TV and allow myself the luxury of a trip to Miami to be with friends. We venture out on the lanai, share a few stories, have a bite of cheesecake and soak up the Florida sunshine. The visits may be short, but as I bask in the warmth of these special and sacred moments, the world seems a little less cold, a little less lonely, and just a little more golden.