Introducing the Beloved Friends I Was Dreading to Be With

In an earlier posting, I expressed my love and appreciation for the friends I was leaving behind in San Francisco, but now I'd like to introduce two sets of friends I love and appreciate at a distance, through letters and, in the case of Jutta, throughta shared diary.  (We're now on Volume 3.)

Annie and Rosa are part of a small group of long-distance friends I call the Anminroti

Annie is from France.
Minako is from Japan.
Nicole is from San Francisco
Rosa is from Spain
and the ti stands for Tina.

I already knew Nicole from City College of San Francisco, where we taught from 1982 to 2014, when we both retired.  (We got our full-time jobs and our tenure the same year too!)

I met Annie in 2001 through Jean, a French man I met and dated when I lived in Algeria 1974-76.  He introduced us through letters he wrote both to Annie, who was living in San Francisco at the time, and to me.  Then through Annie, I met Minako and Rosa, who were classmates at City College, where they were all taking Nicole's Current Events class.

After all of them had moved back to their native countries, we corresponded through e-mail as a group.  Then in 2003 Annie hosted us all when she and her husband Jean-Paul were celebrating their fiftieth birthdays.  Before the rest of the Anminroti arrived in Brittany, I spent a week with Annie and her family in Andresy, outside of Paris, where Jutta (whom I'll introduce soon) joined us.

Rosa hosted Annie, Minako, and me in 2015 in Sant Cugat del Valles just outside of Barcelona.

Both Annie and Rosa were extraordinary hosts, creating memories that would last a lifetime even if our lifetimes were not closer to the end than to the beginning!

Jutta, who joined Annie and me, was my penpal back in 1963, and I still have all her letters--so beautifully hand-written and often illustrated.

We met for the first time in 1997, when she, her husband, and their three almost-adult children came to San Francisco on what they thought would be their final trip as a family.

My meque (mejor que un esposo--better than a husband) Javier and I stayed in Bremen, Germany with Jutta and her husband for a week in 2011,and in 2014  Jutta and I also took a trip to Switzerland together to meet our favorite Swiss writer, whom she's met at book readings in Germany.

She and I have shared a diary--with  hand-written entries--since 2001.  We have "emissaries" bring it back and forth, and we are now on volume 3.  Nicole, at a music festival in Mali in 2010, got the diary from Jutta, who was in Mali working with teachers.  I used their photo on one of the cakes at my 70th birthday celebration!  Jutta, my penpal form 1963, and Nicole, a member of the Anminroti, had met!

So why was I dreading to be with these beloved friends?