Friend #2 - Davida

An old friend from study abroad

Week 2. There was a part of me this week that felt a bit embarrassed that I had revealed so much to so many people. Another part of me thought about the coming weeks and looked for stories in the people I meet daily. This week was a bit easier.

Davida and I met during our semester abroad in Strasbourg, France in 2018. We ended up in the same group during registration because our last names are both in the first half of the alphabet. If my last name hadn’t started with an ‘A’ and hers hadn’t started with an ‘F’ then maybe we would have never crossed paths.

Originally from Florida, she went to school in Louisiana and when I met her I was introduced to a couple of other girls - “The Louisiana girls,” my roommate would later call them. Anyway, I ended up traveling to Luxembourg with the Louisiana girls on my first weekend, and Davida and I did a couple of other trips together - Krakow, Prague, Vienna, and Lucerne.

At the end of October, we met for the first time in over four years. I was spending some time in Miami and she was now living in Dallas and I thought, “Why not? If not now, then I’ll probably never see her.”

Davida was a really great host. It was interesting to see her all grown up in her own apartment and now working in real estate finance. We quickly caught one another up on our lives and as she drove me around Dallas, I realized she could be on America’s Worst Driver. “Everyone in Dallas is a bad driver,” she assures me.

Over the weekend we went to the Texas State Fair where nearly all the food is fried, and The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza.

“There are so many young moms in Dallas,” Davida tells me.

“Could you imagine yourself with a kid now?” I ask her.

“No,” she laughs.

On the Friday, Davida’s cousins invited us over for Shabbat dinner. Her aunt and uncle are warm and her cousin introduced herself as a medical student who recently had a baby.

Her uncle asks about my family and mentions that he has a friend who is a dentist in Netanya, the city in Israel where my mom is from.

“My grandparents were both dentists,” I tell him.

“Maybe they knew each other. This is his last name,” he says.

“I’ll ask my mom,” I reply.

Davida’s cousin Josh returns from Friday service to tell us about the weekly Torah portion.

He says, “When you go through a negative experience, you don’t need to look for the positive in the negative. Instead, acknowledge the negative and then try to reframe the negative experience as something positive.”