THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 24, 1994 TAG: 9407210183
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 03 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Ford Reid
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
When I tell people that I've just spent a weekend with friends that I've known since school, including three that I've known since we started kindergarten together in 1949, I get looks of vague disbelief.
When I tell them that one couple came from Tokyo just for the weekend, they begin to wonder what is in the pipe I am smoking.
But trust me, it is all true.
Every few years, we get together, an unlikely bunch that has spread far and wide from Louisville, where we grew up.
We range from slightly off center to arrow-straight. Our paths have been radically different and our styles of living, too.
STILL, SOMETHING THAT clicked when we met 35 or 45 years ago continues to click. To the rest of the world, we may not look much alike, but we are all friends, with a level of trust and tolerance that is not always found even in families.
When we first got together after not seeing each other for many years, it was clearly a reunion. We got out yearbooks and class pictures and talked deep into the night about what once was.
Every other sentence seemed to begin with the phrase ``Do you remember when
We teased each other about high school foibles and remembered fondly our rare triumphs on the football field. We talked about who had dated whom and we talked about the thousands of ways that we gave our teachers and our parents fits.
We wondered what had become of this person or that person and, usually, someone in the group knew the answers.
This time, the word reunion didn't really apply.
We were simply a group of friends getting together to eat too much, to play too hard, to miss a lot of sleep and, mostly, to enjoy the company of one another.
We talked about the joy of our lives and about some of the sorrow and suffering, too.
STRANGELY, IN THIS the year that we all turn or have turned 50, we talked more of the future than of the past.
While we were there, a friend from a different part of my life, an older fellow, died after a long bout with cancer.
As I worked on a eulogy for him, I began to realize for the first time how well I knew him and he knew me and how much his friendship had meant to me. Those were things I had known all along, I suppose. I just had not given them much thought.
It has become the nature of our society that we move around a lot. We go from job to job and from town to town and don't spend much time looking back. Friendships form, but then they are dropped, forgotten.
Don't let that happen.
It is not sentimental to say that you should hold on to friendships. To do so is, I think, a matter of survival or, at the very least, a matter of greatly enhancing the quality of your life.
In a lifetime, the truly lucky among us might really connect with 15 or 20 other people.
Hold on to those. You could lose your money and your house might burn down. You can wreck your car and get fired from your job.
You might even lose your mind.
But friendships can endure. Even when a friend is gone, the memories will help to sustain you. by CNB