Silver and Gold

     In my last posting, I said I had been doing little but "lazying around like a slug." Not completely true.  While I certainly have been un-ambitious on lots of fronts, I have been very diligent in maintaining something of tremendous importance: friendships.
     I spent a couple of days in the City with a dear and long-time friend (and I do mean "long" -- she was my attendant at my nearly-30-years-ago wedding) from New Hampshire.  Although we hadn't seen each other in years, we didn't skip a beat, just plunged back into our friendship as if not a day had passed. Calls, letters and e-mails have flown back and forth since, constantly refreshing and reinforcing our closeness.


Self-portrait with Deb and Monarchs

      I had lunch with a long-lost friend and co-worker, found through Facebook. We caught up on work friends, spouses (new, ex and same-ol'), plans, adventures, and, above all, we re-discovered the links that had made us friends in the first place.  Many more lunches are in the works.
     I hijacked my best friend for a road trip to Monterey Bay where we crossed something off my bucket list by seeing the over-wintering monarch butterflies. Even though we were too late in the season for the masses of monarchs I'd been hoping for,  it was still pretty impressive -- and a wonderful girls' day out (plus da kine manapua and spam musubi: ono!).
     I exchange phone calls with friends far away -- pals from our Hawaii days, now in New Mexico; my husband's sister and my heart's friend in western New York -- and near at hand -- former co-workers with whom I have a special, far-beyond-work bond; chance acquaintances who've become dear companions. We plan future get-togethers, we reminisce about the past, we meet for drinks, they come over for dinner, we go off on adventures, we just talk.  They give me support and understanding and hope.
     In other words, we are friends.
     Many, many years ago when I was a youngster at Girl Scout camp, we used to sing a song around the campfire, a lovely little three part round that stays on my mind and in my heart: "Make new friends," it went, "But keep the old./ One is silver and the other gold."