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.