Me and Sharon: A tell-all writer and his private pal

Just the other day, I texted my friend Sharon with a request that’s not unusual for two people who’ve known each other for years.

I’m playful with Sharon and she unfailingly responds in kind.

“Hey,” I wrote. “I want to send you something. What’s your address?”

And then I followed up: “And don’t be a punk with questions.”

The answer came an hour later.

“Moi?”

We were both obviously multitasking.

“Address pretty please?” I eventually responded.

But Sharon is complicated. Our relationship is complicated.

I knew what was coming. 

“So I have to say this,” she responded. “u know how private I am and I’m assuming my address will die with u?”

I told her I’d forget it as soon as she sent it.

“It won’t end up on any bathroom stalls in Vegas?”

Ah, Sharon. She knows me.

“You won’t give it out to anyone … promise me.”

I promised, adding, “Have I not proven that you can trust me?”

She finally sent it, but I could almost feel her fingers trembling as she typed.

“Yes. It just freaks me out. But here you go … I probably won’t sleep tonight.”

So here's the thing about me and Sharon.

We’ve never met, not face to face, anyway.

Our relationship has existed solely in the realm of emails, texts and telephone calls.

Those calls have lasted hours on end, over several years.

Now Sharon laughs. At the start, she cried. 

In distressing detail, she related events in her life she had never told anyone else, not her husband, children, her mother.

But she told me.

At times I felt like her therapist, or a childhood confidante.

I was neither. 

I was a writer at work on a project about Ernie Feld, a Jewish baker who had survived World War Two as a Nazi prisoner with arrogance and pluck.

But that vanity and hubris carried over into Ernie’s life as a professional baker in the U.S. For all of his cruelty, he was known as the Kitchen Nazi.

As his only daughter, Sharon worked alongside her father as an impressional young girl and teenager. In our calls, Sharon talked about the emotional damage wrought on this daughter of a difficult man.

In the beginning, I dug for details to help explain the psyche of the father.

But those talks shed light on the daughter as well.

In time, I shared some of my own traumas.

Along the way, a bond was forged that is not unlike the pen pals of another generation.

It’s an odd relationship that seems an antidote for the Age of Covid, this realm of facial masks impersonal ZOOM calls, social and psychological distancing.

I’ve never seen Sharon, not even a picture.

But I don’t need to. I already feel like I have known her a long time.

She’s my friend. She trusts me, and I her — implicitly.

Hey, she even gave me her address.

She’ll never talk to you, they all said.

I was researching a treatment for a film project about a bitter old man so damaged by his wartime experiences — his own abuse, and losing both his mother and younger brother to the extermination camps — that he lashed out and hurt those closest to him.

His litany of wives, his son and of course, perhaps most of all, his only daughter.

I had done a newspaper story on Ernie and got to know him. I returned several times to his bakery in the woods near Lake Tahoe. 

I liked him. He was scrappy, with a wry and challenging sense of humor. 

Most of all, I respected all that he had endured.

But I had never worked in his kitchen. I never saw him hurl pans and shout insults at the top of his voice. So I talked to those who did.

Everyone said the same thing:

“You should contact Sharon, his daughter.”

Before adding: “But she’ll never talk to you.”

Nobody on her father’s side of the family even had her number. She was estranged from that part of her life, and for good reason.

Finally, I convinced her mother, Ernie’s second wife, to give me her number.

“But she won’t talk to you,” she warned.

I almost didn’t call. And when I finally did, I had zero expectations.

The voice that came on the line was almost girlish, but guarded in a way of someone used to fending off phone solicitors like me.

I told her I was writing about her father, a man with whom she had not spoken in years, who was not invited to her wedding and had never met her two now-grown children.

She didn’t hang up. 

She listened.

I think the breakthrough came when I told her about the perception that she had inexplicably exorcized her father from her life.

Well, that made her mad.

There was a story nobody had heard, or even thought to ask about.

And if I was going to write about Sharon’s troubled relationship with her father, she wanted me to hear both sides of the story.

We talked on and off for months.

It was important to me — and especially to Sharon — that I got this right.

We would talk as I took notes. Sometimes, Sharon would cry and I would support her. This was difficult work. I was a man and had had a good relationship with my own father. At first, I couldn’t understand that hurtful dynamic she had endured.

But I tried. 

And eventually, like getting deeper into an engrossing novel, I got it.

I told Sharon she was brave but she insisted that brave people did not cry.

After our talks, I would type up my notes and send them for her review.

Often, a nuance was missing. So we went back and covered the same ground.

Sharon was always apologetic about the work it took to get the story right. 

I told her something I’ve found to be true as a professional interviewer: That it’s far more difficult to answer the questions than ask them.

The cruelty and dereliction in the stories was stunning.

She told me about how her father once beat her pet Siberian Husky with a shovel right before her eyes, how he had left her alone for a week at a time to run his rural bakery while he returned to Oakland.

She was 13.

Even as an adult, Sharon still does not like to be left alone when her husband is away on business. For comfort, she relied on the company of her dog Jackson, a 150-pound Newfoundland breed that I imagined looked like Marmaduke from the old comic strips.

She talked about the yelling and the insults, her efforts to understand her tempestuous father. She explained why Ernie was not invited to her wedding.

“I agonized for months. I never knew when he was going to explode,” she said, breaking into tears. “And I didn’t want to be like this, crying. You dream about your wedding day. “I was only planning to do it once. And I didn’t want the most special day in my life to be ruined by my father.”

Her experiences became two chapters.

The first one started: “Ernie’s only daughter suffered the worst.”

And it was true.

But Sharon tried to keep a relationship. She sent Ernie cards on his birthday and on holidays. He was her father, after all, however flawed.

At one point during the time of our talks, Ernie died. Sharon did not go to his funeral.

She explained why. Again, in tears.

It just caused too much hurt.

I shelved the project for a year or so. And then it ran as a serialized blog in the Jewish Journal. I was also running installments in this space on my website.

Sharon and I took up again. I had sent her the entire manuscript but it was painful for her to read, a loop of abuse.

Then something wonderful happened, something that helped forge our friendship.

My first drafts were often riddled with typos, so Sharon offered to be my copy editor.

Each week, before I published, she would dutifully read each chapter and make not only grammatical fixes but also correct errors in fact.

And you know something? Sharon is a damned fine editor. I think she might have missed her calling.

She jokes that I'm a terrible typist.

I say I have buttery sausages for fingers.

The most difficult chapters were the ones about her relationship with her father. 

But Sharon got through them.

She didn’t sleep much the nights before each installment was published, before her life was laid out in public.

After the series ran in full, Sharon and I kept in touch.

I would call her, as I explained “just to yack.”

She’ll often comment on a particular blog post, like the one in which I wrote about all the barbarian things I say to my wife.

“I enjoyed your story, John,” she wrote. “Although I’ve known u for a few years now and have never experienced this behavior u speak of. How have u held your tongue for this long? Lol Must be taxing to keep up the facade of being well behaved?”

I told her that it was easy with her.

But we still have our differences.

We almost could not be any more different. Sharon is extremely private. I’ve never had an unexpressed thought.

I say Sharon is brave. She insists she is not.

Not long ago, I asked for her thoughts about me writing this blog post.

“What if I wrote a blog post on our friendship,” I wrote. “Just think about it.”

She said she would.

No pressure, I insisted.

“I feel none,” she responded. “hard to believe, huh?”

Along the way, Sharon’s dog Jackson died. He lived ten years and she’d lost a dear friend. I wanted to send her a book by the naturalist Sy Montgomery called “How to be a good creature,” about the friendships that can be carved out even between species.

So I asked for her address.

I dedicated the book to Jackson. I hoped that she would find comfort within its pages.

She sent me a wonderful and thoughtful thank-you note.

Because that’s what good friends do.