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Like Mo on the Korea Adoption Blog, I, too, have been blessed when it comes to friends. From all over the world, of different ages, religions, ethnicities…species, even… treasured
relationships have developed, been fostered and thrived year after year. No matter distance, my friends are my friends, and the longer I live the more friends I have and the more I treasure each one.
I’ve had the honor of being befriended by an orang utan, a couple of chimps, a giraffe and a lemur, as well as a number of dogs, cats and birds, and am so privileged to have shared and enjoyed their companionship. It was a 33 year old orang utan I turned to for comfort when my dad died, and the peace he gave me at that intensely painful time as he traced the tears on my face with his huge, long fingers is a gift I hold in my heart and still bring to the fore when I need a bit of extra strength.
I have been so lucky while stumbling along the road. Meandering paths have often led to lifelong friendships. I met Shelley because of a conversation on an airplane to Cambodia. Dennis was on a tiny boat with me in Borneo. Carola traveled with an old friend I met up with in Costa Rica. Roger and Lisa were part of a whale research project passing through the Indian Ocean. Rick and Janice were on a China trip with Jen and me. Many of these led to others that continue to lead to others.
I moved around too much as a child to have friends that go back as far as my childhood… my brothers are the only connections that old…but I don’t feel the lack. Gayle and I started a conversation in 1973 that continues to this day, so that makes her my “oldest” friend. I didn’t meet Gay until 1996, but she’s the friend I now see almost every day.
I have friends in their 60s and friends in their 20s and don’t notice the difference. The biggest division between types of friends now would be those who communicate a lot via the internet and those who don’t. Living so far away as I do, personal contact is very hard, so email is a lifeline. I like to think I’d be as good a communicator with my friends were snail mail the only option, but I don’t think that’s true. Another reason to love this time we live in!
The world wide web is such a wonderful tool and has allowed me to reconnect with friends I thought I’d lost track of forever. Janice W. found me through Google a couple of years ago and we’ve been in touch ever since…even thought of writing a book together and may actually get around to that someday. Through a mutual friend, Liz and I found out that we’ve been living in the same neighborhood, relatively speaking, for the past 3 years… she’s in Nairobi, less than a 3 hour flight from here… and we’re off to her place at the end of May. Tina, who worked for me in her first job at the age of 18 and is now a successful PR woman, keeps me posted on her life. I get photos of Mirko and Davorka’s grandchildren in Vancouver. Jennifer and Nancy, high school friends of my daughter, include me in mailings about births in their family, and Christian, met on a pub crawl in London in 1986, introduced me to his wife and new life on the Isle of Wight via the Internet.
And the list goes on and on! How lucky can one woman be? And it just keeps happening, one friend after another.
