When we were in Cleveland last week, a dear graduate school friend drove two and a half hours from her home in western Ohio to see us. We met in the mid-afternoon on Thursday, talked and talked, had dinner at a wonderful Portuguese restaurant, went back to the hotel, and talked for several more hours.
I offered to get her a room at the hotel so she wouldn’t have to drive back that evening, but she said she was used to day trips to Cleveland, and had to get back to do a medical treatment to one of her cats. She drove back home safely.
It had been 35 years since we had seen one another. We had only kept in contact with Christmas cards. Our friend commented that it seemed like we had just seen one another yesterday. Our conversation was mainly about the present, with only a few references to the past. It was delightful and heart warming. We promised not to wait another 35 years before we met again
Who are the people you can just start up with after a long time not seeing? What do you think makes for a good friendship?
Trail Baboon 
My two best friends, Paul and Dennis. Both live far away. Paul in Palm Springs, Dennis up near Crookston (a 7-hour drive if you don’t think Crookston is far away). We stay in contact via text, emails, and rare phone conversations. I see Paul twice a year for golf junkets, Dennis annually for a weekend when I’m Up North at a nearby book festival.
In both cases, our relationships started with regular contact for many years before we went our separate ways via careers, marriage, etc.
Yet for both guys, six months or a year seems like a day apart when we reunite. I think if you have a truly good friendship based on trust, mutual respect, shared interests, and honesty, you can be apart for months and know that your friend will still be true to you and to themselves, so when you get back together there are no surprises, no game-playing.
Bottom line: good people make the best friends.
Chris in Nova Scotia (off to check out the tides in the Bay of Fundy this morning)
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In 2019 I attended my high school graduating class’s 50th reunion. Of the almost 700 who graduated in that class, about 50 had already died, and of the remaining 650, only about 100 attended the event. I had kept up with nobody at all. As I prepared myself to make the trip and show up, I thought through who I might like to meet and what I’d like to talk about.
Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” helped me think this through. I wanted nothing to do with “how it was then”, and little to do with, “what have you done since?”. In the end, I didn’t get to sit with the only person who I wanted to spend much time with, so was at a table with a few folks whom I’d slightly known those many years ago. We had a great time learning about who we are now.
If there’s a 55th next year, I might consider it. I’ll hope to sit with a different bunch of people, because there’s so much to learn.
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Did you ever get to talk with the one person you had hoped to visit with?
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We saw each other, exchanged a few words, but had a wonderful phone conversation later. It satisfied what I was looking for.
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Good for you!! When I was in high school, the majority of my friends were either a year ahead of me or a year behind me. I do still get the newsletter from my high school, despite having contacted them a couple of different times and said “save the postage”. I don’t even recognize the names of my classmates!
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Rise and Reconnect, Baboons,
A lot of Baboons make picking up on a conversation easy, especially on our blog format where we gab away most mornings.
My group of High School friends meets yearly. We just pick up where we left off at our summer gathering the year before. During the years in which many of us were raising children and having careers we did not see each other much. But now that the kids and careers are launched elsewhere we have a lot more contact. We were a bunch of band geeks and National Honor Society “Goody-goodies” who never got in trouble during High School. Our adult lives played out differently, of course.
I have to launch myself out the door now A certain puppy is giving me the “are we going for the walk?” eye daggers so her patience with me is about used up. More later.
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Can’t resist this quote – another opinion on yesterday’s question about how many cats:
“Having many cats is good. If you feel bad, you look at the cats and you feel better, because they know that everything is just the way it is. You don’t have to be nervous about anything. And they know it. They are saviors. The more cats you have, the longer you will live. If you have a hundred cats, you will live ten times longer than if you have ten. One day, this will be known and people will have thousands of cats.”
-Charles Bukowski-
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I have two friends like this, where even though we go back decades and see each other seldom, we don’t have to cover all the ground in between, and can just start with now. I notice that we haven’t lost our sense of humor, and that is one thing we share. Another is that we have a similar world view.
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I do have such a friend 245 miles to the north. He and his wife were recently here. Yes, our conversation started right up again. The few people here I might call a friend I suspect do not know about Sandra being in care. I am sure they would not reach out to me. Our conversations would be stilted for various reasons. I do fine alone any way.
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My former coworkers from the hospital and I have been able to pick up right where we left off. It’s so much fun to get together and reminisce or catch up on our current lives. Some moved away when our jobs came to an end there. Others left state employment entirely. I’m the only one who stopped working as a nurse for awhile and went to work for the DNR. The rest were smarter than me. I know that now.
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Three out of my four best girlfriends have moved out of town in the last five years. I am, of course, trying not to take this personally. My bestest BFF Sara lives up in Kenwood. Shared interests, shared types of goals, shared worldview — all add to that friendship. Another besty, Pat, now lives in Nashville. I just called her last night to vent about my sisters (we have a shared interest in sister-venting.). And then we got off sisters and had a good laugh about a lot of other things. Laughter is key in my friendships.
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I can now pick up being a Twins fan.
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Twins win! Twins win! I’m taking credit.
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Yeah!
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