QFT: Time

[00:00:00] Nina: It isn’t always necessary to do a cross the country, fancy girls trip. Sometimes you just could keep it simple. A little bit of time is not probably as much time as you want, but it might be enough time.

Welcome to Dear Nina: Conversations About Friendship. You have arrived at a very exciting episode. It is three years since I started the podcast. I’m announcing an entirely new sort of series. I don’t know what else to call it really. I’m going to be doing my schedule a little differently from here on out.

Three years is a long time to be podcasting. Many podcasts don’t make it past the first 10 episodes. Podcasting is a ton of work and I do all my own editing now. Three years ago, my brother in law, Dave, thank you, Dave, I’m so grateful to you, helped get this podcast off the ground, including helping out with the editing. It got to the point where I was doing so many interviews and, you know, I work kind of weird hours late into the night, random early mornings, fitting in pockets of time. I really needed to be able to control my input and output of this whole thing. So I learned how to do it on my own. And Dave, handed it over the reins to me, soon after I’d say six months into the podcast.

But we’re at the three year mark two and a half years of me completely doing it on my own with no help, now I have added a little staff. I have a new associate producer, Rebekah Jacobs. So she is on board. We are talking about lots of ideas together. She’s helping me keep my interviews organized. I get a lot of pitches, a lot of people who want to be on the podcast and Rebekah is helping sort all that out too. It’s so nice to have someone on the team.

Rebekah and I are friends that I’ve only met in person once. We’ve really spoken a lot. she’s been in my writing class too. So we had lots of zooms together online. We know each other quite well now. And she was always sending me tons of articles and different ideas about friendship. And finally, one day I said to her, can we make this more official? Because I felt like I was taking a lot of her time. So she is now officially on the Dear Nina team.

I have also newly hired some social media help to help make videos from the podcast. Her name is Jennifer and Jennifer really knows a lot about podcasting and SEO and things like that. she has suggested doing some shorter episodes in between, which I really am excited about.

I tried some of that here and there over the years, but I’m going to make it more of a consistent series. These are going to be series that get used in between times when I don’t want to share a whole interview, either because I need a break from such a long edit, or I just have a thought to share that I know fellow friendship enthusiasts will really enjoy. I have come to know my listeners over the past three years. Some of you have been with me since 2014 when I was writing about friendship. And of course there’s new people. Some people listening to this episode, this will be your first episode.

So something to tell you is that it’s been a long time, 10 years since I’ve been writing about friendship and now officially three years podcasting. I have a Facebook group at Dear Nina: The Group, and through all these elements, plus my newsletter, dearnina.subsack.com, I’ve gotten to know the listeners and readers a lot.

Plus, I get so many anonymous letters, so many, and I cannot use them all. About a month ago, I did an Ask Me Anything episode, just as a trial kind of thing to use a bunch of letters. I liked it actually, and a lot of people liked it too, but it did get a little long for that format of just my voice. So instead of doing something like that, again, where I do a bunch of letters at once, I am going to more often use some of these letters, not only in my newsletter, which is what I’ve been doing, but also on the podcast.

I’m going to just do one at a time. So that will be called the letter spotlight. If you ever read titles in your podcast feed, when you open up to Dear Nina, you’ll see that that’s called the Letter Spotlight, and then I will have a description right after that .

[00:04:00] Nina: For example, I have one coming up. That will be Letter Spotlight, Sisters in Law. I’ve received several letters over the years about Sisters in Law and the sort of tricky friendship slash family relationship that comes out of that. And I’m going to use one letter in particular. So look out for that one in the next month or so. And today’s the quick friendship tip is about how you don’t need as much time with your long distance friends as you think, but you do need some time. I’m going to tell you what makes me say that it’s based on a personal example from my life very recently.

As a matter of fact, I just got back from Chicago. I grew up in Highland Park and I have several dear friends who still live there and I have a very close friend who also moved away. Her name’s Gwen. I’m going to shout out to Gwen. Gwen moved to Miami. We don’t get to see each other quite as much because we’re not always visiting our families who still live in Chicago at the same time. So I was going to Chicago without my husband, without my kids. It’s something I try to do every couple of years. First of all, for this reason, so that I can really spend a little extra time with my high school friends, which I don’t have as much time to do if my family is with me.

I have my own family in Chicago and some of my husband’s family is in Chicago that I’m very close to and really enjoy seeing whether he’s with me or not. it is hard to fit everybody in. when I go alone, I also get to go to all the stores I want to do. Certain restaurants, certain cheese fries at Michael’s that I have to have that my family doesn’t necessarily want to partake in.

This was one of my trips to Chicago, but I had another reason to go other than seeing friends, which was my mom sold the house that she and my dad, raised me and my sisters in, that my dad grew up in, my grandparents built that house in Highland Park around 1950. And it was really emotional to say goodbye. I’m actually going to get a little choked up even thinking about it because my dad died two and a half years ago and he was very attached to that house. I mean, it was like a part of him and he was pretty sick for the past 15 years. Um, he was diagnosed.

About 20 years ago with Parkinson’s and he had a good 10 years or so where he was still able to be quite active, but in the last Certainly five years and really more than that he was able to get out of the house with some help and go out and do what he could do, but in the last five, maybe even 10, I mean, I’ve lost track of time, years that I was visiting Chicago.

If I was spending time with my dad, it was almost always in the house. It was not that easy for him to go anywhere, which was hard because he was such a doer, I mean, he’s a huge Chicago sports fan and he would go to all the games he could, big Cubs fan, which is a bit of a trek from Highland Park, but it was important to him and he did it for as long as he could until it became really too hard, and anyway, I didn’t mean to get so far into that, but, uh, I came to say goodbye to the house. So I was spending time with my mom. I was also wanting to spend time with my friends, but I didn’t have a ton of time. So that is the point I’m getting to, and yet it was enough. I had one dinner. with Taryn and Jennifer. It’s just easier for me to use names. I hope they don’t mind. Just one dinner. It was about an hour and a half.

It was amazing.Taryn I haven’t seen in a while, but we talk constantly. Jennifer and I don’t talk on the phone as much. It’s how life goes. There’s something so powerful about having this moment, even if it’s just an hour, even if it’s just a walk, there have been times where I’ve come to Chicago and had a lot of family stuff going on.

Like maybe we’re there for a family bar or bat mitzvah. You know, maybe I’m there for something for one of my sister’s events or one of my sister in law and brother in law’s events. therefore I don’t have a lot of extra time to see friends. And so maybe we only get a walk in or only get one lunch And it’s not as much as anyone would want. I’m not trying to suggest that more time wouldn’t be wonderful. my point here is that even a little time is meaningful. Even a little time means something and you shouldn’t skip it just because it’s not enough time.

I think people do that. I think there’s this sense that like either we’re spending the whole weekend together or we’re going on a trip away or meeting somewhere out of town or we shouldn’t bother. If I had had that attitude over the years, I wouldn’t have been able to keep up with some of my high school friends because it would have felt like, well, if Nina’s coming into Chicago and she’s only going to make time for one lunch, like why bother?

I guess we’re not really close. My Chicago friends have been really understanding on the different pulls of my time there. I appreciate their graciousness that they don’t have the attitude of like, Oh, she’s giving us scraps. I mean, it’s not like that. By the way, my family could feel that way too, because I do spend time with my friends.

And so they could feel like I’m giving them scraps. There’s only so much time. We don’t come in for that long. It’s, it’s very hard to, I have four kids and they often have stuff going on, back at home. So I was able to have that dinner with Taryn and Jennifer. Jennifer had to go out of town right after that.

And so then I had a walk with Taryn and Gwen. They came to my mom’s house and we went from room to room. I’m getting like choked up again thinking about that.

Okay. Settling down. So we went room to room and we just had lots of memories and they have so many memories of my parents and that’s irreplaceable to have your childhood friends experience that with you. Then we walked for maybe 40 minutes that’s really all we had. Very last minute, Gwen’s mom spent some time at Taryn’s house I wasn’t planning to go over there that night.

I was exhausted. I had dinner with my mom and my sisters and it was our last dinner together in the house. And it was very emotional. And I was like, I’m done for the night.

But then. Taryn texted me and said, Gwen’s mom is here. I haven’t seen Gwen’s mom in a long time and I love Gwen’s mom. Remember Gwen’s the one who lives in Miami. So she doesn’t always manage to be there, of course. And a really important point, I know I’m kind of rambling here, is that Gwen came in

cause I was coming in. She said, tell me when you’re coming in. I’ll come in at that same time. And that was amazing and we didn’t even get that much time together. We had that walk, I ended up going over to Taryn’s house . And then we had breakfast the next morning with me arriving in absolute fresh crocodile tears.

I had driven away from my mom’s house, said goodbye to my mom, said goodbye to her boyfriend. It’s just leaving that house was hard. I was tearing up a little as I left the house. And then as I got in the car and drove to breakfast, at Country Kitchen, all of you locals to the North Shore will know that’s kind of a staple breakfast place.

I was on my way to Country Kitchen, just sobbing, driving up St. John’s, really kind of out of control. And then I arrive at Country Kitchen. I step out of the car. Gwen and Taryn see me and they’re like, we don’t have to eat breakfast.

We can just go on a walk. But I was like, no, I, I wanted to eat. My plan was to have breakfast with them and then get right back on the road to Minneapolis I needed to eat. We got in the booth at Country Kitchen, I cried a bit, and it was not just about the house.

I mean, of course, it’s also about my dad. I can separate the person from the place, but they are so, so, so connected. It’s really lucky. It’s lucky that in the 24 years I’ve been living in Minnesota and the four years of college before that, I’ve always had the same place to visit and go back to. So that’s, just going to be different and I was just processing all of that. And then finally, I was like calm and I really wanted to hear what was going on with the two of them because I was like, wait, this is all the time we have right now, we had our, quick evening at Taryn’s house the night before, we had the quick walk when we went around the house, I walked around the neighborhood. Then Taryn and Jennifer and I had that, one, dinner, but this was going to be it.

And I didn’t know the next time I’m going to be seeing them in person. So we had a really great rest of the breakfast where we mostly focused on them. Thank God. Cause that’s like enough of me really is. I think it’s important to be aware of that, that even when you’re going through a thing, it’s like everyone else has their stuff going on and got to check in with everybody else.

We talked a lot about what’s going on with the two of them. We walked around one of my favorite stores, which is next door. , we each, uh, tried on some things, which was fun. I can’t tell you the last time I’ve gone shopping with my childhood friends.

And then I got in the car made my way back to Minnesota, which with a stop takes about seven hours. So I had a lot of time in the car to think. And the first thing I thought about. And then thought about many times was how special it was to spend time with Jennifer, Taryn and Gwen, and that none of it needed to be a lot of time.

We didn’t have to go away to an expensive hotel. It isn’t always necessary to do a cross the country, fancy girls trip. Like sometimes you just could keep it simple. A little bit of time is not probably as much time as you want, but it might be enough time and one meal even.

I only had the one meal with Jennifer to me that was worth 8, 000 texts. Of course, we’ve been texting tons since we are each sending a kid to college this fall. So, uh, it’s fun to even be doing that at the same time. And she’s sending me links of all the stuff we realized at that dinner that she’s way ahead of me and the dorm room stuff, and I’m just kind of clueless.

And I appreciate it so much. We wouldn’t have known that that wouldn’t necessarily have come up if we didn’t have this whole meal together. So she’s been sending me links and helping me out. It’s just great. A lot can come from these short times in person together. Thank you for listening to me, if you got this far.

Ramble on about my own life. I actually try not to get overly bogged down in my own life and friendships and keep it about the guests and the readers and all of you, but it probably helps to hear some personal things too. I will have a . An interview for you next week. I’m always recording with interesting people.

We are diving into juicy friendship topics. Also keep an eye out, like I said, for that letter spotlight episode coming up about sisters in law. See you next week when our friendships are going well, we are happier all around. Bye.