Commentary: Newport Beach showered us with friendship

When Lee and I celebrated our 10th year as residents of Newport Beach, someone asked what I liked best about living here.

You’d think I would have said, “The ocean!”

I’d always wanted to live near the ocean, and here we were.

But what I found best about Newport Beach was that nearly every woman I met was happily married to a great guy. It had been my experience when living in the Valley that while my women friends were great, their husbands . . . weren’t so great.

Over the course of our 30 years there, several couples divorced and several remained in unhappy marriages. Still, as members of a UCLA alumni group, Lee and I had made a circle of friends. We partied within and without the group, playing bridge with some couples (even some unhappy ones) and going to an inordinate amount of football and basketball games with others.

When we move here, Lee and I didn’t expect to find another social circle at our advanced ages (77 and 62). I had just received my master’s of fine arts (MFA) degree, and I expected to do a lot of writing in the daytime while Lee read or gardened or fiddled around on his computer. It would be just the two of us having cocktails in the early evening, rocking in our deck chairs and watching sunsets over our modest view of the Pacific.

It’s funny that though things don’t always work out the way you expect; they frequently work out for the better. The catalyst for my changing our minds was my sister’s sudden widowhood. Fortunately, she had lived in the same area for over 40 years and had several well-established support groups of women friends.

It was something of an epiphany for me. If Lee should die, I thought, I will be totally alone here.

I joined Newcomers, a women’s social group with many activities that included husbands. The women I had gravitated toward were friendly and fun, and remarkably, the husbands were as nice as the wives!

Lee and I attended the parties and joined the bridge groups and soon found ourselves part of a lovely bunch of couples who got together outside of Newcomers to play bridge or to otherwise socialize. Lee became a regular member of a poker group with husbands of the Newcomers’ wives.

Now it has been almost 13 years since we moved here. Many things have changed considerably for me since Lee died.

Yet, it’s still true about the friends we made. The husbands are as kind to me as the wives. One friend insisted her husband come over with his electric drill and fix a wobbly chair for me. And one of the husbands spoke at Lee’s memorial and said the way to keep Lee with us was to keep Liz, me, in their minds and hearts and lives. Wow. If I hadn’t already been tearful, his big-heartedness would have opened the spillway all on its own.

And our friends have remained true to that. They continue to include me in their activities. At the New Year’s Eve gathering, they wanted me to stay after dinner, taking turns playing bridge with the women’s husbands. I did go to dinner, but I didn’t stay for bridge. I felt overwhelmed with the affection and tenderness of the wonderful men and women friends Lee and I made in Newport Beach. I became so emotional that I needed to go home to watch the ball drop alone, thinking about how lucky Lee and I had been.

LIZ SWIERTZ NEWMAN lives in Corona del Mar.