The Value of Old Friends

I am surely the worst of friends.

If you're in my life on a daily basis, I can be (or I assume I am) as friendly a guy as you would want. But if you're out of sight, you're out of my mind. I am HORRIBLE about letting the very best of my friends fade out of my memory. My memory is not good, but it's really not that bad, either. I don't know why I don't call or email or visit, but I don't. And as I let them slip from my memory, I find I am losing something important, something of myself that I will greatly miss if it's gone.

For some reason, I have come to realize the mistake I'm making. So over the last few weeks I have been calling, visiting, and emailing the friends that are the main characters in so many of my best memories. Some have moved from Home, as I have, and some of those are quite far indeed. Others are still there, going on with different lives. But they're all somehow part of me, a part that I now know that I miss very much.

Tonight I was again reminded of how much I need my friends. One of the friends I grew up with came to my parent's house for dinner while we are in town visiting. She brought her two children - one of which I've met, the other (the 2-year-old) I have not. We talked about her life, and we talked about ours, the conversation suffering from neither the searches for wayward children nor from the years since we'd last talked. I was amazed at how easily the conversation came for her, my wife, and especially for me.

Last week I visited another of those old friends while visiting Home. Yesterday I called my best friend, and a bystander could not have known that it had been months instead of hours since I had heard his voice. I'm not the most emotionally articulate guy. My wife calls me moody. So maybe this post is a symptom of another mood swing.

But I've found something. Remembered something. And I think I know what it is, too: Home.

Anybody up for a game of spades? Play to 1000, no red twos, blind low is 200, bags, ...