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Friendship often requires the careful dance of shared time and being attentive to one another’s needs Recently when I visited San Francisco with my two closest friends, we spent a lot of time seeking cheap dinners at different times of day, according to the various cycles of our appetites—deli sandwiches, burritos, greasy slices of pizza, hot dogs slathered with sweet onions and mustard It became essential to learn the rhythms of each other’s bodies, aches and pains Then there is the matter of overcoming the small irritations, the disputes over rules for card games, or who owes money for last night’s round of drinks On day one of our trip we visited We Are Here at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the first retrospective dedicated to artist and activist Suzanne Lacy’s over-forty-year career Lacy is interested in hunger and waiting, sharing food, and the anticipation and patience that attends communality  As the exhibition shows, her formal and thematic concerns have remained pretty much consistent: food, dinner parties, tables, maps, quilting Among her best-known works is The Crystal Quilt (1985-7), for which she brought together more than 400 women over the age of 60 to discuss their views on growing older while collectively producing a quilt She has since staged various versions of this social action, including ‘Silver Action’ at Tate Modern in 2013 It’s because of works like this that I think of her career as productively ghostly and incomplete Lacy is committed to waiting things out, to seeing things through over and again — whether pleasurable, uncomfortable or violent   On display in the middle of the exhibition is a set of photographs depicting one of Lacy’s first collaborative performance works, Ablutions (1972) The images show three bathtubs in the middle of a gallery filled with blood and clay Broken eggshells and animal kidneys are scattered across the space In the early seventies, when sexual violence against a spouse was still legal in California, Lacy, Judy Chicago, Sandra Orgel and Aviva Rahmani’s Ablutions (1972) placed women in