A Friend Museum

While removing myself emotionally, I have been looking at "friendships".  I find the entire idea of them fascinating.  How we get them, how we maintain them, what we have to do to keep them, and many time how they are lost.

I do not in any means consider myself a social person.  I feel I am much more of a hermit.  I would prefer to stay home on any given night than be forced to socialize. My children are the only exception to this.  I always want to see them.

A number of years ago I was very much in an industry that required socialization.  It was pertinent to my career.  My cell phone was handed off many times with a blithe, "Here, add your number and I will find you on Facebook."

I acquired a mass amount of of friends rather quickly.  We worked together and commented on each other posts.  I made sure to comment on a "new" friend's Facebook page.  The act of securing the "friendship" so that I might gain work in the future.  It is an odd business, late night bookings made in clubs while waiting backstage.

"Can't wait to work with you again!" Shouted over the sounds of local music playing.

And then I left.

I stopped working in that business.

The phone calls dropped off, the names forgotten, the comments less and less until nothing from either one of us.

I was known, then I was not.

A ghost.

When you have a baby you gain friends, you find a community of like minded parents and become the very best of friends, nursing together in public while talking about nursing together in public.  Your children go to the same Vacation Bible School, you arrange car pooling, you pass your child off to your friend so you can take a nap, or do laundry, or clean the house.

Then your children grow up a little more, and realize they are nothing alike. They find their own set of friends, and you start all over trying to make friends with their parents.  By teenage years, the parents names become something in your phone "in case of emergency", not to call for coffee dates, or long lamenting conversations of the difficulties of raising teenagers.

There are many times in a life when you gain friends and many times there is a culling of friendships.

If your spouse is sick, you gain many friends.  If your spouse dies you lose more friends than you originally gained.

If you move out of town, or even to another neighborhood, you lose friends, and gain a few new ones.

If you take on a new spouse you gain friends by proxy and hope like hell you measure up to the ex that the same friends new and adored for years.  Secretly hoping you surpass the ex.  But these friends are not truly YOUR friends, they are a package deal, much like children are.

Time moves on, much to your consternation, and another culling occurs.

Again I feel the need to reiterate that I find this to more of a social awareness, I do not have any emotional attachments to it.  I did at one point, and there is one or two lost friends that I miss dearly.  For the most part I find it fascinating.

My latest perturbation arrived along with my mother.  I truly and finally let go of the career I was once so proud of.  A career my family knew little about, and even my mother in her lucid years did not care so much to hear about it.  I tried to show her the accolades I achieved and was met with a distant boredom in her eyes.  I gave up trying to achieve the accolades I thought I was rightfully due.

I feel the need to interject here that, yes I do have friends, I have a handful that I know would do anything for me, that would be there more faithfully than the US Postal Service.  Three of them I have known most of my life, more years of friendship with them than time spent walking this earth.

They just do not happen to live in the same state as I do.  None of my great friends live where I do, except for two, and they have been slowly disappearing from my life as well.

My mother arrived and life changed.  Another marker of time passing.  As she once took care of me, I now take care of her.

As a result, more "friends" have dropped off the radar.  I do not blame them, I am guilty of not keeping up with phone calls, and when I do I turn the conversation to them. ask them about their lives, tell me what it is like out there in the world.

I could make new friends now, and instead of talking about breastfeeding, we can talk about how to get our parents to take a bath.  That would require effort beyond what I am willing to do.

My mother was, is, and always has been the center of attention, and so she remains, her audience is just a little smaller now.

She naps in the sun as I write this.  She asked me today where I wanted to go.  It was an odd question and seemed out of nowhere.  I replied "Everywhere."  She laughed and said, "Well, that won't happen."

It may be true.  She used to dream of going to Italy.  She never did make it there.

There has been a song rolling around in my head for the past few days;

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
'Til it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

I would like to gather all my old and new friends on that parking lot and make it a paradise party.

For that I would leave my room and socialize with my past, present and future.

That Was Then...

If you know me, you know that I hate the month of August.  Only one day in the entire month do I like; the day my eldest daughter was born.  That's it.  That is all.

I do not like the heat, I do not like the memories of those that have died in this month.

I have tried always to find the good that lies within the bad, and recently I realized I was not looking hard enough.

I am one to point out the sky frequently to whoever happens to be near me.  My children will notice a beautiful sunset, some will wake earlier than normal to see witness the sun appear over the waves in the horizon, only to go back to sleep.

We take in nature as much as we can.  We baptize ourselves in the waters of a pool, lake, creek, and the occasional salty waters of a beach.

We witness the color of leaves as they change, and that is a hard feat to achieve in this part of Texas, as leaves tend to turn to brown and fall off out of boredom, or some sort of heat suicide.

When the children were young they played with Rolly Pollys.  Poor little bugs curling up in defense of our entertainment.

If a toad reaches our door we all go and look.

I have woken children up to witness a meteor shower, or just to see a full moon.

And should it snow?  That is certainly a reason to wake up a sleeping child and go outside and play!

Since my Mom has arrived to live here with us, it has been more like we are the ones living with her. We do as she wants to do.  Much of that is sitting outside.  I have spent more hours outside than I have within.

Mom will often look up to the sky and comment how beautiful it is.  I glance up, notice nothing unusual and say a half hearted, "Uh-huh" and go back to looking at my phone.  Anything to distract me from the heat.

I wait.  I wait for hours to pass so we can go inside, I wait for Meredith to come home from work so I can spend a precious few minutes in air-conditioning.

Day after day Mom will comment on the sky.

When the sunsets Mom has no desire to sit out back and witness it.

I try to coerce her.  She is perfectly happy where she is, looking up.  Looking for planes that will never take her back to what she once knew.  Looking up at birds, always looking up.

Yesterday I put my phone down and when she commented on the sky, I too looked up.  It was blue.  Cloudless and blank.

What does she see?  What am I missing?

Like a tornado it hit me.  I am missing the now.  

She sees infinity, she does not see blue skies of her youth, or of her child rearing years.  She does not see blue skies of the future.  For her there is only now.  She sees the vastness of the day, for her that is all exists.  Now.  Today.

I breathe in the now with her.  I see it.  For me it is fleeting, I am barely in the now with her.  I am in the past, the future, and yes the now, but the now of children with flat tires, to children who are angry at me, or meals that need preparing, to ice that is melting too fast.

I take her hand.  Together we sit in the now and look up.

And isn't it a beautiful now?

I am glad to have the now, because all too soon it will be then.