In 1973, I was in sewing class in seventh grade and having a miserable time. I couldn’t sew and wasn’t interested in learning.
For the first time in my life, I was failing a subject in school, a fact that dragged on my frail sense of identity and self-worth. I felt like an outcast among geniuses who were easily making pillowcases, skirts, blouses. I would never catch up.
I was walking gloomily back to my sewing machine at our junior high in Gardena, in Los Angeles County’s South Bay, when I suddenly noticed a Latina girl with a loose braid down her back who was bending over working, but not on a pillowcase or a skirt. She was drawing a horse. It was accurately rendered and lively, its mane flowing, almost galloping off the page. I was so mesmerized that I forgot everything except the fact that I, too, drew horses. A sign!
“Nice horse!” I burst out. She turned around in her chair, eyed me a moment before grinning, responding, “Thanks,” and turning back to her work — her real work, it seemed to me.
Instantly, everything was different. The classroom that had been so isolating became a golden space of affirmation and possibility.
So began one of the most enduring friendships of my life. Even though Cathy and I more or less parted ways after junior high, we’ve stayed connected over the decades since, and the initial magic of mutual discovery never faded. It was something I could always count on, something that became increasingly important as we got older and the inevitable small tragedies and disappointments of life piled up. But our friendship always managed to hold the real world at bay.
Until Trump.
In June I went to visit Cathy in Tennessee, where she and her husband had moved six years ago. We had talked about me visiting them in Chattanooga for years, but much had intervened — not least the pandemic — until now. It had been eight years since I saw her last. I was thrilled at the prospect of a five-day vacation away from L.A., and of seeing her, as always. But for the first time, I was also dreading it. That’s partly because Tennessee had become Exhibit A in Southern states’ efforts to disappear Black representation after the Supreme Court destroyed what was left of the Voting Rights Act — one of many concerted moves against people of color that has defined the Trump age.
But the bigger reason for my dread was that I didn’t know where Cathy stood on all this. Over the last decade or so her politics had shifted right, something that coincided with an embrace of religion and that she made public sometimes with Facebook posts. For the most part, we didn’t talk about the shift directly. But in 2026 the stakes of a difference that we once had the luxury of downplaying had grown enormous and nonnegotiable. The personal, political, even spiritual, had melded into a single stance that had immediate implications not just for us, but for democracy itself. I was going to Tennessee to answer a question that for over 50 years had never been in doubt: Was it possible for us to remain friends?
If she was MAGA and supported Trump, then absolutely not. As his administration has become more racist, more corrupt, more authoritarian, by the day, I have grown increasingly certain that I can’t embrace anyone who supports or even tolerates him and what he stands for.
I’ve heard the argument that it’s better to keep your politics and personal values compartmentalized for the sake of maintaining relationships and community that are the bedrock of society. But it’s exactly that kind of compartmentalizing that has allowed Trump’s hate, racism and cruelty to fester, flourish and now threaten to unravel the entire American social fabric. The imperative of the moment is clear: We have to live not our politics but our values, or we lose it all.
For the first three days we didn’t talk about current events. I wasn’t compartmentalizing, just buying time, I told myself. Meanwhile, Cathy was being a wonderful host with a whole itinerary for us: dinners out (much less expensive than L.A.), a boat tour around the city (more interesting and entertaining than I expected), a date at the local art museum (exquisite).
I confess that I was more than happy to let her take the lead and for me to play tourist, absorbing the sights and sounds of a new place and otherwise relaxing and having fun, something that had started to feel impossible in Trump 2.0.
Our time together felt natural, how it had always been between us. I had always admired her confidence, and aspired to it. I also admired how she always plotted her own direction in life and was never afraid to change course. Years into studying animal science she pivoted to graphic design, and after having considerable success, pivoted again to realize a long-held dream of opening a clothing boutique in San Francisco. I was much more cautious, and regarded Cathy as a role model of courage. If she could follow her stars, I could too.
We didn’t plan to talk; it just happened. Instead of doing another planned thing on the vacation itinerary, Cathy, her husband and I sat at the dining room table and talked about what we had never talked about before: what we believed in, and why. How we saw and lived race, inequality, democracy, our place in this perilous moment in the history of the country.
The bare subtext of this often heated conversation was how it all bore on our friendship. Despite my efforts to stay calm and rational I almost immediately broke into tears. I confessed right off that I had already ditched a few friends who had become too cozy with Trumpism, which I didn’t regret, but I didn’t want to ditch her. I was deathly afraid I would have to do that, I said, which is why I’d avoided this conversation until now. And if the discussion went south, I said with increasing agitation, was she going to throw me out?
She looked astonished and responded that she, too, had lost relationships when she became a conservative many years earlier. Progressive friends and acquaintances had excoriated her, cut off contact. It had hurt her, I could tell. As the tense but civil exchange progressed, it became clear to me that Cathy had no intention of cutting me off or throwing me out, even though she knew exactly where I stood on racial justice and all manner of issues that are anathema to the right (I write columns, after all).
I was enormously relieved. And even more so when she told me she is not MAGA and does not support Trump. She described herself as more of an old-line conservative, the kind that has no real place in the GOP anymore. I told her I didn’t agree with that kind of conservative either, not least because MAGA evolved from it. Despite being currently estranged, they’re connected.
How connected they are for Cathy wasn’t entirely clear. But the big reveal for me was that after such an unprecedented and high-stakes confrontation, our friendship didn’t budge. During the conversation, through many moments of discomfort, frustration and downright weirdness, Cathy remained rooted in a very specific place in my heart that she’s occupied since we met. We didn’t resolve anything that day. That first conversation, in fact, stirred up enough questions and uncertainty to fuel several more, equally heated ones.
But what was confirmed amid the uncertainty is how essential we remain to each other, how the friendship lives on as something magical but also as unadorned and heavy as rock. Even under threat of a profound split, we remain each other’s support and inspiration. It was Cathy I was modelling as I stood firm and listed all the intolerable sins of Trump and his unwavering supporters; it was Cathy who, in showing me self-assurance at such an early age, had helped me build my own.
It was also Cathy who, with her abiding love of horses, put me in touch with my own latent love of animals. In the last 20 years I’ve owned as many as six dogs at once and several cats. Cathy has been an equestrian for a long time and owns a horse we visited twice as part of the Tennessee itinerary.
Watching her tend to her horse one hot afternoon, adjusting the saddle and then riding, I was mesmerized all over again: Here was the dream she used to draw so vividly, over and over, made real. I know that though we see some reality differently now — and probably we always did — it isn’t the end. We have dreams in common, dreams that are still playing out. That doesn’t make us the same or even in sync, but it’s enough for us to draw on, over and over.
