Mary Ann Frank and Lauren Pinkza with Willow on Thursday's walk.
The word on Cliff Street Thursday was: Female friendships.
As in long-haul female friendships, nurtured on morning strolls. They can get you through a pandemic — and help you grapple with mortality.
They can even get you through a disappointing morning sandwich.
“We’re talking like 26 years,” said Mary Ann Frank, said of her friendship with neighbor and “soulmate” Lauren Pinzka as the pair paused their morning walk in Edgerton Park to chat for the“Word on the Street” segment of WNHH FM’s“LoveBabz LoveTalk” program.
Before jumping on radio, the two friends had been deep in discussion for over an hour.
The duo were leading Frank’s Portuguese water dog, Willow, through a soft rain in Edgerton Park — remembering Frank’s late husband, Ralph, who passed away six years this Tuesday of a brain tumor, “thinking of others we have lost, and talking about how much we love each other,” Frank said.
Since Frank and Pinzka moved to the same block two decades back, they said, they’ve provided one another with “companionship, support, a listening ear,” and a sense of “trust.”
“Really,” Frank said, “like, incredible trust.”
“We’re in the 65 and over group,” Frank noted.
She and Pinzka built their friendship on conversations about raising kids and sustaining marriages. Now that bond helps both of them mourn the relationships they have lost and reflect on the nature of mortality.
“A dear friend of mine just died of brain cancer,” Pinzka shared. “And my mother died the same time her husband died.”
But, Pinkza said, she had a more pressing issue to talk about Thursday morning: The pandemic.
She wasn’t using Covid-19 to continue on the topics of death and grief — but to note the fact that East Rock Coffee wouldn’t let her eat her “egg with arugula” sandwich inside their shop.
After contracting Covid despite having gotten boosted, “I thought I could eat inside,” she said.
Instead, she had to consume her breakfast on the street. No words… just street.
“I had a maple and cardamom latte,” Frank said. “Which was delicious.”
Unfortunately, Pinkza said of her sandwich, “I just didn’t like it.”
But “I’m not blaming them,” she added.
Instead, the experience prompted her to wrestle with the reality that “this pandemic is still going on.”
Luckily, she had her pal Frank beside her to unpack a new world of rules, regulations, and disappointments.
Frank is “the person who will listen to all your stories,” Pinkza said. “When men don’t wanna hear all the details, women want to hear every detail.”
Women want to hear every detail! Lauren Pinkza and Mary Ann Frank (center) with the WNHH/NHI "Word on the Street" team.
“I do think that friendships between women are very complicated,” Pinkza admitted. “Women are inherently competitive — they are more demanding of each other.
“Women give men a pass. They’re kind of insufficient in certain areas so they’re not gonna expect it of them,” she said.
But women “ask a lot of each other as friends. That’s where you get some of your greatest rewards. That’s gonna be your soulmate.”
That reasoning inspired Frank to continue developing more friendships through her later life years. Her pathway to doing so was creating a crew of neighborhood dog walkers who “wake up at ungodly hours” each morning and meet up in the park.
“It happened during the pandemic,” she said. “We were so lonely.” Anyone who is interested, she said, can join her group of New Haven and Hamden residents from Newhallville to Whitneyville to East Rock in “free flowing” conversation — and, on occasion, “coffee and sweets” — at 7 a.m. in Edgerton every day.
Frank and Pinkza agreed that place, community, and Cliff Street were responsible for their unique connection — and, more specifically, the late Rhoda Brownstein.
Brownstein was the pair’s real estate agent. She persuaded them both to buy homes on Cliff Street, rather than Orange Street, where Pinkza said all of the New Haven excitement happens, like getting pushed out of East Rock Coffee.
Besides featuring basic appliances, reasonable prices, and a neighbor who served on the admissions committee at Hopkins, the street had “Mary Ann down the block with her two little kids,” Pinkza recalled. Those things convinced her to choose Cliff over Orange.
It turned out to be the right decision, Pinkza and Frank said. Though many of the families, whose children went to the same elementary and high schools, have since moved on, Frank said the street was always, and in some ways remains, “unusually tight.”
The Edgerton park entrance Thursday morning.
When her husband died, Frank did struggle with whether to stay or leave Cliff Street.
“I faced a decision: Are you gonna downsize? My kids are 26… I took a number of years to think about it and I thought — I’m never leaving this place,” she stated.
Instead, “like so many people during the pandemic, I’m gonna renovate!” she declared.
While Pinkza, a Yale professor, was enjoying the long morning walk in anticipation of teaching a 2:30 Zoom class on “classical tragedy in French literature,” Frank was dreading assembling a boxed Ikea bed later that day.
The “theme” for her house makeover, Frank said, “is beauty.”
“When you have small children, the theme is practicality — it’s trying to stay sane.
“I’m not thinking about all those things now. I can think about beauty,” she said.
“That’s one of the most amazing things about getting older,” Pinkza affirmed. Besides the “joint pain,” you discover that age “really means that you’ve made your place in the world — and you really don’t have to prove yourself. And now it’s a little bit about you and what you want. It’s kind of an unexpected benefit that goes along with the pain and the loss.
“You have to embrace the good. And the good is, well, we’re reaping the rewards of what we’ve done in our lives.”
Watch the full interview below.
Female friendship is one of the great and enduring gifts in life.
While I can't agree with some of the observations made about female competitiveness with each other, to the extent it is sometimes seen, social conditioning may be the better explanation.
As a graduate of an all girls high school and a women's college, at a time when career goals for girls were not the norm, I feel especially grateful to have shared the societal and educational challenges with kind, smart and ambitious girls and women who persevered to discover and utilize their skills. For the longest time, being a wife, mother, maybe nurse or teacher, were the only acceptable goals.
Even in law school, the next time my education involved being in class with men, the phrase "think like a man" was a regular hint that women were meant for other things. Fortunately my smart female class mates quickly figured out that thinking was neither masculine nor feminine; that one could have both a uterus and a brain simultaneously. Subversive humor has great survival value. Many of them excelled which was quite disruptive at the time.
Such friendships and support have become even more valuable in retirement. Women know they can turn to a female friend for a ride to the doctor or a cup of tea when the going is tough. Without an image to support, women can be vulnerable and honest in way that men of my generation can't even imagine.
Maybe one day society will allow men complete access to their emotions and to genuine friendship. Younger men may already be on that path.
Spouses, partners and lovers may pass in and out of lives for various reasons, but Friendship remains a gift.
This Valentine's Day, I will celebrate my friends.