Friends

My new year’s resolution this year is to be a better friend. There are advantages to living in one community for the majority of one’s adult life. One of these is the opportunity to develop friendships that span not only many years but also many aspects of our lives. In any community, there are hundreds of folks who make it a better place to live through every day large and small acts of friendship. For what is a community if not a place where people feel safe and welcome and valued? A friendship is a treasure that requires time, care, attention and nurturing. I can think of countless everyday actions that have strengthened the bonds that connect my friends with me, both when I was the recipient and when I was the giver.

Through participation in a variety of civic and social opportunities, it is easy to develop multiple circles of friends. For example, I have my church friends, my professional friends, my parenting friends, my service organization friends, my gym friends, my reading club friends, my good neighbor friends, my fellow martini-sipping friends and my all-around funny, free spirit friends. I have friends whom I admire intensely for their good and charitable works in the community and I have friends with home I can laugh my head off and not be embarrassed if my laughter is too loud. I have friends who astound me with their wit and those who inspire me by their insight and compassion. I have been greatly influenced by friends who have supported me in my times of trial and who have allowed me to share in their own times of crisis as well as celebrate in their times of joy. In fact, I like to think that the person who I am today is the sum total of all my relationships and encounters.

In addition to resolving to be a better friend, I think it is important to take the time to say thank you to friends who have been companions to me through so many phases of my life’s journey. For example, I have friends who have volunteered to pick me up at the train station or the airport; offered to pick up my mail while on a trip; come to my rescue and comforted me when my precious pet got loose in the neighborhood and went missing for 48 hours; understood when I had to bow out of a social engagement because I needed to care for an elderly parent; brought me hot soup when I was ill or sipped hot tea with me when I was grieving; helped me fix the leak in the bathroom sink; encouraged me to take risks and to follow my passions; walked with me; talked with me; shared my love of lectures, books, concerts, gardening, and classic films; sat with me when I had the blues and patiently waited until I came out of them, without judging or offering unsolicited advice; allowed me to share my deepest fears, joys, and confidences; invited me to join them in special activities that I otherwise might never get to experience; demonstrated their trust in me by asking for my help on a project or a problem; given me an honest opinion when I needed it; let me know tactfully and lovingly when my behavior was less than stellar.

Along with me, consider yourself truly blessed if you can say that you have similar friends in your life. Then ask yourself if you are the friend that your friends need. Are you serving as your friends’ sounding board, trusted companion, confidant, and cheer-leader? Are you the friend in the examples above? I know I have lots of room for improvement and I thank all my friends for forgiving my shortcomings. I’ll try harder this year.

My Reading Life: Time for the Pursuit of Personal Passions

When I think back upon my earliest years growing up in the small town of Shepherdstown, West Virginia, my most vivid memories are of walking with one of my sisters or my brother the three blocks to the town library. In the early fifties, parents could allow their children to walk unaccompanied without fear of abduction or another equally horrendous fear of parents today. I walked freely, carrying my borrowed treasures under my arm, taking in the happy sounds of the rippling brook that ran parallel to King Street, and looking forward to the new treasures I was sure to find in my beloved library.

The library in Shepherdstown was located literally in the center of the small town with a population of just about one thousand people. Located at the intersection of the main street, German Street, so named for the original German settlers, and King Street, the library was directly across from the entrance to the small college in town, and sat right in the middle of King Street, so that all traffic had to go around the library, creating a miniature traffic circle, with the library in the middle of the circle. In my child’s eyes, the library had to be the most important building in town; otherwise, why would it occupy this most central spot? Upon entering what looked like a two story house, I experienced the feeling of being welcomed into the living room of a kind, generous neighbor whose doors were always open and who was willing to share of her riches with all who entered.

This combined anticipation of adventure and discovery along with the very real sense of comfort and safety that I experienced inside the rooms of the library are the most likely source of my life-long love affair with reading. Books were my magic carpet. Through the avenues of hard-bound volumes of sheets of paper covered with words, sentences, poems and stories, I was able to venture beyond the borders of life as I knew it into the lives of people and places that inspired a great sense of curiosity and ambition that I may never have known otherwise.

I still own a copy of my all-time favorite children’s book, Madeline. The opening lines of the story, “In an old house in Paris, all covered with vines, lived twelve little girls, in two straight lines,” along with the picture of those twelve little beds in the orphanage in Paris are forever engraved on my mind. As I grew older, I was drawn to read biographies. I remember in particular a series of orange hard bound biographies of famous people such as Helen Keller, Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Jane Adams and Marie Curie that made me think that I too could make some great contribution to the world. Then, I discovered the Nancy Drew series, about the strong-willed teenager who allowed me to join her in the world of mystery and intrigue. As a middle schooler and high schooler, my tastes inevitably changed. Does any girl forget her first reading of Gone with the Wind? Or The Diary of Anne Frank? In high school, I remember being one of the few students in my class who was excited to get a new reading assignment in English class. How could reading the story of Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter ever be considered as work, I wondered.

Now, four decades later, in my retirement, I am in the position of being able to partake in the sheer luxury of reading whatever and whenever I please. Whether it be sitting on the chaise lounge on my back porch in the summertime listening to the chirping of the birds or the humming of the neighbor’s lawn mower, or curled up in the folds of a warm comforter in winter, reading affords me the opportunity to do two things I love at the same time, i.e., to immerse myself in a great story and to spend quality time with my 17-year-old Siamese cat.. Miss Coco is always right there in my lap, sometimes sitting directly on the pages of my book, or otherwise obstructing the line of vision for reading, requiring frequent cuddling and gentle readjusting of the seating arrangement in order for me to get to the end of an episode or chapter.

In the past two years I have read dozens of books, mostly fiction. One of the many goals I set for myself in my retirement was to catch up on all the novels and movies that I had not had time to read or see while I was working full-time in a profession that demanded nearly as much time outside of the regular work-day as during the work-day. Why am I so passionate about my books? Is it the pure distraction and escapist pleasure derived from engaging with real or fictional characters who find themselves in any of a myriad of true to life conflicts or moral dilemmas which probe the depths of human nature? Or is it because the act of reading, and really engaging with a book, keeps the mind active, one of the most frequently cited secrets to fighting aging? It’s probably both, and then, the icing on the cake is the opportunity to follow up what some call a solitary pastime with a group of like-minded folks, in my book clubs, with lively discussions and sharing of reactions to the reading, therefore furthering the insights into the book and simultaneously, forging new friendships.

I realize that everyone is not as enamored of reading as I am, but most of us have a secret passion that had to be set aside during the thirty or more years of working to earn a living. What was your passion? Have you taken advantage of this phase of your life to pursue a long-repressed pursuit? Or have you ventured out into new areas of self-discovery that you didn’t even know existed since your retirement? In either case, isn’t it great to have lived long enough to pursue these self-indulgent pleasures or equally creative new opportunities for self-discovery?

Friends and Neighbors and Snow

There are truly generous people in this world. I know this from personal experience. If you know about the blizzard of February 2010, then you know that the picture chosen for this posting is real. You might be thinking right now –gee I’m glad I moved south and don’t have to deal with that kind of mess anymore. (For more pictures and reminders of why you moved away from snow country, check out the pictures on the right side of the blog.)

But this posting is not about snow. It’s about the generosity and genuine helpfulness of people when times get tough. It’s about the friends who stopped by to see me after my dad died and brought me gingerbread tea and then sat with me, sharing in the tea and companionship. That was fellowship in the truest sense of the word. It’s about the colleagues who make a generous donation to cancer research after your sister has died—a donation in honor of your love for your sister, but also an expression of love for you because they love you and want to help ease your suffering. It’s about the pregnant niece who walks in the Susan B. Comen walk to help raise funds for the same woman, her aunt, who later died from the disease. It’s about sharing some of your own personal wealth to buy a goat for a poor family in Guatemala or to make a donation to the local food bank or to help the thousands of homeless families in Haiti. And it’s about the neighbor who plows your driveway—not because you asked, but just because he had the equipment and wanted to be helpful.

I don’t know what I did to deserve such kindness on the part of my neighbor. Maybe he’s just happy that I’m not a grumpy neighbor. Maybe he’s happy that I take care of my property and that I mind my own business. But deep down I do believe the old adage that “what comes around goes around.” Yes, sometimes those who live a life of good purpose and love toward their fellow man get a raw deal--case in point, my sister-in-law who never hurt a fly but who suffered terribly from the fatal cancer that destroyed her body. How do we explain these situations? We can’t. We accept the unexplainable. We have faith that there is a higher purpose and that we are not always in charge of our lives. There is a higher power at work. And in the meantime, we just go about our lives, doing the best we can, and trying to observe the Golden Rule—“Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.” No matter what your religious affiliation, few can argue with this credo.

So, I thank my neighbor. I thank my friends who sat with me. I thank my sisters, my brother, my children and friends who accept me for who I am and who help me to be the best person that I can be. I thank everyone who has in some unique way given of themselves to make someone else’s life better.

If you have a story to tell about an act of kindness that you observed or that you were a part of, write it down and share it with others. And say a little prayer of gratitude.