by Karen Telleen-Lawton, Noozhawk Columnist (read the original in Noozhawk by clicking here)
Gather a few grade-school girls, add forty-odd years and occasional away-weekends together, and you’ve encountered a group of women that understands sustainable friendships. Maybe they’re desperately trying to hold on to a fleeting glimmer of youth. Maybe they just haven’t cleaned out their address books. Are there magical ingredients that allow friends to support lifelong relationships?
Daily life awards us a multitude of quick and serviceable acquaintances. We work or volunteer together, run into each other at local events, and fall into like-minded conversation on similar topics. We subconsciously or consciously screen from these friends our most seminal moments. Many of these light friendships pass as we make the transitions through different activities and phases of life.
Lifelong friendships evolve from sharing transformative moments. Life throws curve balls, hard balls, and not a few screw balls. The circumstances, their timing and our reaction all dictate how events meld and mold our personalities. By the time we reach middle age, we have evolved far beyond the selves who made quick buddies as youth or young adults.
Some friendships survive these differences in lifestyle and location. When my grade-school buddies began our weekends away, it didn’t matter much what we did. Conversations rolled over us like the sound of the surf outside our window. We talked in twos and threes and fours, nibbling and sometimes gorging on grazing food and walking the low-tide beach in bare feet. We popped wine corks at sunset, and the conversation segued from politics, careers and aches; to passion and pain.
After we parted our latest weekend, a flurry of e-mails encapsulated our reunion. Jean, my kindergarten friend, wrote, “It was so fun to have shared a weekend with you all! I felt a little bit like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz; wanting to go home but really missing all of you already! I thought of Willa Cather in My Antonia: “Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”
Katie added, “As I drove home on Sunday, I felt that I had three additional sisters watching my back.” Monica, whom I met with Katie in sixth grade, contributed, “It gives me a lump in my throat to have your notes connected through this e-mail. I’m a news junkie, but when I got home I had no desire to read the missed newspapers or flip on the TV news, because I felt so enriched from our weekend.”
Girlfriends gone, I try to puzzle this out. Maybe it’s the deep knowledge of our roots that allows us to act with special grace. We were there for the “firsts;” for celebrations and tragedies large and small. We have a common history; there’s a comfort in this shared narrative.
When I listen to a sustained friend tell a personal story, I think, “If I were in your shoes, I may have acted likewise.” For old friends in err we are rarely temped to throw the first stone. We’re more willing to help each other reach for our better selves, because we know those authentic selves.
A little book I treasured as a child was Joan Walsh Anglund’s A Friend is Someone who Likes You. This was a sufficient title for a child, but I’d modify it now: a friend is someone who likes you despite everything.
Karen Telleen-Lawton, Noozhawk Columnist
Karen Telleen-Lawton is an eco-writer, sharing information and insights about economics and ecology, finances and the environment. Having recently retired from financial planning and advising, she spends more time exploring the outdoors — and reading and writing about it. The opinions expressed are her own.