California, Thanksgiving 1990
This is one of my oldest friends, Joy de Guzman, with my sister Katya. Joy and I knew each other peripherally when we went to Venado Middle School and also freshman year at Woodbridge High School (I think her older sister Carla may have been in an algebra class with me, and Joy and I had English together in 7th, 8th and 9th grades). We really barely knew each other, but for some reason she was feeling bored one summer day and wrote me a long, six page letter (keep in mind, she has tiny handwriting!). I had just moved from Irvine, California, back to rural western Pennsylvania, and she figured I must be feeling lonely and disoriented. This began a correspondence that has spanned an entire decade now as we still write regularly (the letters dropped off for a while, but now that we are both on email we at least say hello to each other on a daily basis!).
Although the underlying foundation that has supported our friendship has always been writing -- the exchange of ideas and words in the form of poems, short stories, and philosophical treatises -- we do get to visit each other about every two years. We have done road trips from Irvine to San Diego and to San Francisco; she has also visited me at Penn State. This photo took place during one of our actual, physical visits.
My freshman year at Penn State, Joy was missing me and thought that I must be missing my mother and sisters, who had moved to Orange County, California, so she flew me out for Thanksgiving, and I divided my time between my family and Joy’s family. This isn’t the first time that she’s flown me out; I also went to her junior prom (in fact, I never went to my own junior or senior prom, because after being taken to the prom my sophomore year and then flown to Joy’s prom my junior year, I decided it was time to retire my goofy tuxes... at least I wore a black tux to her prom; I can’t say the same for my sophomore year when I wore a godawful white tux that looked bad, even in the eighties!).
