For twenty-five years, one of my closest friends in Topeka was Mona, a woman twenty-five years older than I was.  I can date the friendship exactly: from 1973 to 1998, when we stopped speaking.  Mona was born in Cairo to an Egyptian father and a French mother and educated in France.  Her father was the Minister of Irrigation for King Farouk, and her family was the richest I had ever known; they lived all over the world.  One of her sisters had married a Russian, who owned the largest travel agency in Colombia and lived half the year in Paris.  He was awarded the French Legion of Honor for his import-export business in France.  For the six months that Alec lived in Paris, where he had a mistress, whom everyone in the family knew about and whom I met once, his wife lived in Colombia; six months later they'd change locations, his wife moving to Paris while Alec lived in Colombia.  For Mona, this relationship was proof of French sophistication and a rebuke to what she saw as American Puritanism. Alec and his wife had separate apartments in Paris's rich 16th arrondissement.  Alec's was a penthouse with suede wallpaper; his wife's wallpaper was silk.  One summer when I had a sabbatical to study in Paris, Alec offered me free use of the separate apartment in his building that he had for his bonne de chambre.  The maid's apartment had a piano.  Here's another example of what seemed to me their wealth and sophistication: once when I went to Mona's, there was a painting lying on her kitchen table among a litter of papers.  "What does it look like to you?" asked Mona.  I said that it looked like a Daumier (the operative word for me was 'like').  "It is," said Mona.  "My brother stopped at our vault in Switzerland and brought it to me."

Her family thought it was very strange that Mona had chosen to live in Topeka, but Mona's greatest love in life were wolves and coyotes, and for the entire time that Mona and I were friends, Mona had three coyotes, five dogs, a cat, and a cage of doves.  I always pronounce 'coyote' as a two-syllable word since that how I heard it for all those years.  The coyotes had individual runs, and every morning until she was in her 90s, Mona entered the runs to clean them.  When Mona would go to France, I would housesit.  I'd take care of the menagerie, hating cleaning the doves' cage the most.  I didn't go into the coyotes' runs, though over the years, a couple of them would let me pet them through the wire.  I had to be alert because they'd often turn and try to bite my hand.  Mona would buy 50# buckets of chicken necks for her coyotes and for the wild ones that came into the ravine behind her house.  She skinned the necks that she was giving to her own coyotes and put the others in baggies to be set out at night for the wild coyotes.  She insisted that I take the chicken for the wild coyotes out after dark.  I did what I was told, but always wondered whether the coyotes might not wait for their food till I was safely back in the house. 

My friends all worried about my stays with the coyotes, but the only problem I ever had was with one of her dogs, Numa, a Rottweiler.  It was totally my fault.  As I let the five dogs out, Numa got into a fight with a smaller dog, and although I know better, I tried to separate them.  Numa turned on me, and we wrestled, eye-to-eye over my arm, which Numa succeeded rather well in shredding.  I finally got back in the house (not before Numa had added insult to injury by biting my derriere).  I didn't trust my driving abilities, so called a friend to take me to the hospital.  When we got back to the house, I realized I didn't have a key to the front door, so the only entry was to climb over the fence into the backyard where Numa was waiting.  Over the fence I went.  Numa, who was normally the sweetest of dogs, ran happily over and sniffed the bandage, welcoming me home.

No one could have been more charming or generous than Mona--when she wanted to be.  I ate at her house at least once a week for all those years, and when my parents came to town, she always entertained them.  Dinners were in the French style with aperitifs and appetizers, three courses with wine, and afterwards always the question, "Un peu de Drambuie?"   My parents almost never drank, so by the end of the meal my mother especially was giddy and giggly.  After my father died and my mother moved to Topeka, Mona was incredibly gracious and caring to her.  When Mona was good, she was very very good, but when she was mean... 

Over the years Mona quarreled with almost everyone.  Her meanness was predictable and unrelenting.  When she broke with me, whom she called her fils spirituel, I wasn't surprised, since she had also broken with her real son.  Mona had a French friend here named Mimi.  Whenever Mimi did anything that Mona disapproved of, she would say in front of Mimi, "Poor Mimi.  She's just a poor, ignorant French woman," and then she'd add, "I mean 'ignorant' in the French sense so it's not an insult."  Sorry, Mona, 'ignorant' is an insult in English and French.  Mona had dragged her second husband, Rene, who was a doctor, to Topeka.  When I first met Mona, Rene was in the last stages of cancer.  The first time I met him, they had come to dinner.  By this time, they detested each other.  As we ate, Mona suddenly said, "Isn't Rene charming?  It's such a pity that he will be dead in a few months."  In the late 80s, I was taking another sabbatical in Paris, and at the last minute I decided to take a friend, Ken, who had AIDS, with me.  Mona was unstinting in her criticism of my decision.  Her last words to me before I left were, "I hope you find someone as stupid as you are to take care of you when you're dying."

And that comment, which came back to me a few days ago, leads me to my point (and I do have one).  I was writing to a friend, listing the reasons that I shouldn't complain (though complaining was what I was doing) when I realized that I had omitted the most important reason of all: that (bracketing Mona's word 'stupid') I'm not going through this alone and that I don't take sufficient time to acknowledge how difficult, infinitely more so, all this would be if it weren't for Mohamed.  So let me say--and not in a shy way--that we're doing this our way and that plural pronoun has made and is making all the difference.