ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 6, 1996 TAG: 9610070015
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: New River Journal
SOURCE: ELIZABETH OBENSHAIN
On a perfect fall morning recently, I joined my father in saying goodbye to one of his first friends in Blacksburg - a man whose kind presence helped define my childhood.
"We were friends for 72 years," my father told another mourner as we stood in the September sunlight at the cemetery. The length and strength of such small-town friendships is one of many things I've come to treasure about living in my hometown.
There a certain security to old friends whom you've known since they had a gap-toothed smile in the first grade or squirmed through teen-age embarrassments with you in high school.
In the long run, though, the important thing is not whether those friendships were nurtured in a small-town world of slumber parties or in a busy big-city neighborhood. Nor whether their faces looked out of our high school yearbooks or belong to more recent arrivals whose humor and savvy have cemented a friendship.
What matters is the relationship itself. In a world where jobs and stress have come to define most people's lives, friends can be a release valve.
Even the Wall Street Journal devoted a column recently to marvel at the success of a group of women friends whose regular dinner gatherings over 20 years had served them well emotionally and professionally as they climbed the corporate ladder.
When I count up the good things in life, such friends are close to the top of my list. One set of friends actually came as a group - a book club I've kept a tenuous membership in from the time 10 years ago when I lived in Lexington. In the years we've been together, the group has helped ease several of us through difficult divorces, remarriages, family tragedies - the inevitable patterns of modern life.
In a two-college town with its share of academic pretension, I've always treasured the description one effete Lexingtonian expressed to a club member. "Oh," she said, summarizing our club dismissively, "I understand you're introspective rather than intellectual.'' And how right she was. Our monthly gatherings usually meander off course from the book we've read into discussions of children and husbands and childhoods in rural Mississippi or Virginia. We've learned a lot and gained a lot of comfort listening to each other.
Then there are other less formal groups - a "ladies' lunch" group, a "high school bunch" group, as well as individual friends who have humor and wisdom to share.
There's nothing like a long lunch or, better yet, a weekend outing to get laughter into our souls, to exchange useful gossip (Virginia Military Institute alumni would call it networking), to marvel that we've survived this far.
As plans for the fall develop, rather than penciling in football games, I try to schedule at least a couple of "away games" with friends - a chance to get out of town and giggle.
We'd probably all be better off if between driving kids to cheerleading or soccer or rushing to the grocery store, we took some enforced time off to decompress with friends.
And there is no need to feel guilty. We're just following the advice from the Wall Street Journal.
Elizabeth Obenshain is editor of the New River Current.
LENGTH: Medium: 65 linesby CNB