Amy "J.T." Bodian ~ Forever Friends

Amy Bodian at Vassar Lake, 1976

Amy Bodian was the most exuberant, creative and zany person I've ever known.  She called herself and everyone else J.T. She talked of mysterious ideas, like the third eye, and played her flute for me within the weeping branches of a willow tree.  She was my best friend and confidante through high school and college, and she was there with my family when I graduated from Vassar in 1976.

Although our lives kept us geographically apart after college, we carried on a 20-year correspondence full of silly rhymes, great affection, and heady philosophy about men and careers and life.  She visited me in Portland in 1990, just after my twins were born, and was so taken by the kiwi vines growing in my backyard that her subsequent letters were all addressed to Kiwitown, USA.

Amy died in 1993 of lung cancer, having never smoked.  I am so grateful to have her letters to remind me of the wonderful friend that she was.

Exuberant ~ that's the word for Bodian.  Whether she was riding her bike through drainage ditches, imagining her next art project or espousing Eastern spirituality, she was passionate about it.  She was open to new ideas, free spirited, the kind of friend who made me think. We had been writing our letters in rhyme for years when she mentioned in a card: I'm doing a new kind of psychic channeling that when delivered is delivered in rhyme - yes I know - it's been our secret all this time.

A talented artist who worked in many mediums, Amy adorned her letters and envelopes with the most expressive beings drawn with just a few lines.  Art was her passion: she attended art school in San Francisco and Ann Arbor, Michigan, but she often questioned whether a career in art was right for her.  I am very confused about my art and the act of creation, she wrote.  I want to experience the power of the spiritual through the channel of the subconscious.  I want to experience it in my own creating, and along these lines work with children and adults.

In her search for a fulfilling vocation, she taught yoga, healing and meditation, created a "sheet project" involving heiroglyphics and ancient hymns, participated in a project for peace in the Middle East to calm that raging beast.  With workshops relating to love, I affirm new signs for that hawk to be made a dove.  In later letters, she wrote with excitement about art therapy with the terminally ill, and she pursued many creative ventures, including plans for an illustrated children's book.

She was wise in ways that still astonish me.  In the late '70s she wrote: Often it is the love I feel for you that gives me such exhilaration in my letters.  I do not think with my brain, nor with my heart.  I absorb with something that is a little bit of both, but neither.  Much greater, much wiser, much more exacting and accountable.  I call it soul, I feel it as power, some know it as spirit.


Throughout the decades of our letter writing, Bodian always made me feel good about myself.  Shortly after I got hired by The Charlotte Observer to take phoned-in obituaries, she wrote:

I must tell you, you yourself are turning into a wiz kid giant, and I expect within the near future you will possess with your winning charm an esteemed and highly acclaimed job working for the New York Times or perhaps even the more radical Village Voice.  Those are the qualities my dearest J as in T does possess.

She often expressed how much our friendship meant to her, addressing me as My Darling J.T. or Dearest Watson or even:

With strange foreshadowing, Bodian once wrote:

It's 1983 / Sing along with me / We're friends till the end / Till death do us part / And far beyond the end to the start. 

Surely Bodian never knew that her time on earth would be so short.  Her wise and beautiful letters help keep her unique spirit alive.  These words from one of her cards say it all:

This season let us rejoice in what we have earned and learned.  Let us celebrate abundance of love and mate, friendship and fine estate.  For you my thoughts and wishes are never late.  Always in your heart am I alive, as one J.T. to another can only realize.
               I love you dearly,
                           Amy