Friendship

I had lunch with an old friend on Friday, and her old friend. I enjoyed myself immensely. It set me thinking about friendship and how precious it is. This particular blog goes out to my friends and so this seems like the best place to comment on what friendship means to me.

Lynne and Darcy made friends in kindergarten when they lived in Winnipeg, if my memory serves me correctly. They are now approaching 60. That's a good run! Earlier this year, I looked an old friend of mine up on the Internet and found her. You could have knocked me over with a feather but it's true. We lived across the street from each other when we were nine and ten years old, respectively. This summer we had the chance to meet each other in the flesh, after thirty-nine years. I hope it will be the first of many times because I really enjoyed it, and so did she. She lives in Edmonton, which is a long way away, but she comes in and out of Vancouver fairly regularly and so we hope to do it again. We need to start on a new chapter.

It seems to me that there is something about special friendships that is probably in the chemistry right from the start. It's almost a given, and then I figure out the reasons for it later on, after we've had the chance to get to know one another well enough to have collected some experiences. My brother would say that it's almost Spidy-sense; the little inner voice that Spiderman refers to that tells him when something is amiss or important - in this case important.

Being in the company of very good, old friends, is delightful to me. It's better than a fine meal. I can feel that they love each other, that they know each other and have compassion for each other, and that they delight in each other. You can hear their shorthand and catch their glances of understanding. There is the sort of history that creates the benefit of the doubt. They don't have to like everything about each other but you know that the overall package is considered to be special and worth cherishing. They've knocked the corners off one another. There is the mutual comfort of knowing that each knows about the others' respective warts, slips and shortfalls and accepts that humanity is part of the package.

Some of this comes with the patina that develops over time. The more experiences you have, the more of the ups and downs that you experience, the more you know that a bad day isn't the totality of a person, and neither is a bad year! I find this comforting. One of my friends sent me a fridge magnet that says that it takes a long time to grow an old friend. How true. Not to denigrate new friends, which bring the promise of new starts and a different road. They will, after all, be the old friends of the future.

Thank you to all my old friends. I appreciate you all more than I have words to say.