I Have Been and Always Shall Be Your Friend

 

I remember growing up as a kid. I have friends that I had since elementary school, children that I grew up with from elementary school through high school. We played little league baseball and sandlot football together. We spent days on the river using car tops as gondola’s poling up and down the river in search of that best fishing of swimming hole. Hunting squirrel and camping out in the woods were some of our favorite things. We talked about all the stuff about growing up and even had the occasional fistfight. It is where I learned exactly how good my parents really were.

Fast forward 10 years and I was off to college. While there for 4 years I established lifelong friends and work colleagues that I have depended on over the years and them on me. Then fast forward 20 yrs again and there are the work friends. We depend on each other to reach our professional goals and we are friends but often we are so different we will never be those close friends of youth. Life has a way of separating us from those friends of youth. It also has a way of separating us from the desire to form those close friendships. Family relationships, children, wives, husbands, nieces, nephews all fill a place, but never that place of childhood friends. I guess the closest things we have to those childhood friends in our adulthood are our siblings.

Come what may, those are our first friends – even if we failed to realize it when we were 10 and he wouldn’t stop looking at me!!!  You only children don’t have a clue. I think about those days and our common bonds. We attended the same church, ate at the same tables, hunted on the same mountains, and fished in the same fishing holes. First cousins can also be included here. Many a night spent at your aunt and uncles house reading comics, playing ball, fishing on the creek or playing pinball at the local country store. It is funny how life takes you apart but not as apart as you might feel. You see each other and even though you are such different people now you still have a report that you just pick up where you left off, sad that it is often at funerals that this occurs.

The holidays make me think of such things and wander back in time to my youth and the things we used to do and the people we used to be. In my neighborhood there were about 10 kids that were my age, or there abouts, and we used to camp, swim and do all the activities mentioned above. These were the kids I rode to school with on the same bus. Of the 10, six have passed on, many before they were even 50 yrs old.  Crystal and I got out our old high school yearbooks and were adding up the folks that we went to high school with, that were gone now. We stopped counting at like 48. This age thing sure is tough to think about.

In February I will be 60 yrs old. The cool thing is of my college friends, I haven’t lost but one or two maybe 3 or 4. I lost one while in college to a traffic accident. The others were for various reasons, cancer and such. It is almost like college makes you live longer. But, I don’t think it has anything to do with college but the nature of work done after college and the decision making skills that were required to get to college that college had no influence in creating.  I am sure there are studies somewhere that document this but I just don’t want to even look them up. Otherwise karma will come along and I will lose another friend or even myself so I don’t want to know.

Have you ever wondered how you got to where you are? Have you ever had second thoughts about your life and your choices? These are the big questions to life. What I have seen is that the smartest people I know are always questioning everything. They seem so unsure all the time. Their thoughts are full of the gray areas that they see as they move through life making decision after decision. The “not so smart” folks never question anything. They make a decision and, for them, that was the only decision because they don’t see other options, even if they are as plain as the nose on your face. They move through life letting life happen to them. Then they wonder why life is treating them so poorly instead of controlling their own destiny – if there is such a thing. They move with the wind from decision to decision with no thought of what comes next. Sometimes I envy them that ability to never know or think of the effects of their decisions in 5 or 10 years.

Sixty is hitting me kind of hard, and I ain’t even there yet. I hope this isn’t a midlife crisis. I can’t afford a Porsche! Probably wouldn’t fit in one either. Also, if this is a midlife crisis then will I have to live to 120!!! My Granny used to say “if I die when I ought too, this will last me the rest of my life.” Can you imagine living to 120. I have enough deficits at 60 that at 120, I would be a slug. So I guess I will have to get over this self pity and get out there and build something. Nothing like the feeling of getting something accomplished to make you feel younger. So when you think of me send up a prayer and I’ll do the same for you. Also, remember that Life, Like Homesteading, is a Marathon Not a Sprint – Slow Down and Enjoy the Ride.

 

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