OLD FRIENDS

In my last post I mentioned meeting new people up here and calling them new friends. The best friends I have though are old friends. Now I am a bad friend in that I never send Christmas cards. I never create Christmas or New Year letters to send out to inform everyone of what we are doing. If I tell an old friend of a change of address it is usually two changes of houses down the line. What I have discovered though is that good friendship is enduring. The mark of a good friend, to me, is if you can pick up that friendship years later as if there had been no break. Because I have moved around a bit this has had to be the case. Invariably, whether it is 2 years or 20 years later I have been able to connect with people as if there had been no absence. I have experienced this with Jane and Dave, Chris and Sue, Maurice and Linda, Tony and Alison, Mike and Joanne, Richard and Shelley and more recently Robert. re Richard and Shelley, I attended their wedding in 1984 and then lost contact with them for about 15 years. When Richard got in contact we just picked up on the friendship as normal. Back in 1999 Richard didn't have a blog. He conducted his lunacy via the post so I was subjected to a barrage of bizarre and anonymous letters. Fortunately his multi-personality disorder hadn't become manifest at that time so it all came from one source. I'm really glad that we connected again. Ditto for Robert. I have connected with him again after nearly 30 years via blogs (anyway his spelling would have precluded any mail ever reaching me). In this way Richard's blog is a hub that connects people. He is kind of like a bus station (in certain lights he does actually look like one- ed) with announcements of incoming and outgoing traffic.