"It takes a long time to grow an old friend."
-- John Leonard
"The only way to have a friend is to be one." --
Ralph Waldo Emerson
WIESBADEN, Germany - Back in the BSM era -- that's Before Social Media -- most of us didn't have hundreds of friends.
If we were lucky, we had a few good friends with whom we shared our daily lives and distant friends we kept in contact with via letters and occasional visits, but mostly slipped away from along with the passing of the years.
Holiday cards were how we measured the extent to which our long distance relationships had deteriorated. First the occasional hand-written letters became typed form letters inserted into holiday cards. Then they became every-other-year cards with the barest of personal news -- followed by cards sent with only the obligatory scrawl from all members of the immediate family simply to acknowledge cards received the year before.
That's not to say we treated old friends coldly, it was just the nature of moving on in life -- meeting different people, getting caught up in raising a family or simply not having the time nor desire to reach out to those who likewise moved on to entirely different worlds.
As a child, I was always a little jealous of those who grew up in one location, had the same friends for life and a place that remained home through the years. Unlike most of my peers who packed up their things and headed off to new horizons every couple of years, lived on bases or went to schools that have long since closed, people like my wife still get invited to regular get-togethers of neighborhood and classroom pals.
I've learned that while they'll tolerate my presence because of their friendship with her, there are years of shared experiences that I will never bridge to join their inner circle.
And that's all right -- because that's the nature of friendship. It's our mutual experiences -- what we undergo together (both the good and the bad) -- that we are able to tap into with those we still care about after years of being apart that forms the basis of our relationships.
Now with age, I realize that because I did grow up having to say goodbye every couple of years, my circle of friends is a lot wider than those who never strayed far from the homestead. In fact home is that circle -- a widely dispersed assortment of people who all have that in common.
Thanks to social media -- something many of my generation still avoid like the plague for fear it only serves the not-so-respectful ambitions of its creators -- old friends are a lot closer than ever before.
That doesn't mean having hundreds of new friends -- it means being able to once again share our daily lives with distant friends and extending that same hand of friendship to those new ones we think worthy of our trust and respect.
"A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same." -- Elbert Hubbard
"A friend to all is a friend to none." -- Aristotle
Social Sharing