Friday Five: Friends

Jan, who I think is new at the Friday Five thing as she's not listed in the sidebar at RevGalBlogPals yet, came up with a terrific question for what may be her first outing:

"Ever since I found out I could be the hostess for the third Friday Five of each month, I have not been able to get the thought of friends out of my mind. Being an only child (all growed up) who moved around a lot in my lifetime, friends have always been very important to me. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: "The way to have a friend is to be a friend."

So today let's write about the different kinds of friends we have, like childhood friends, lost friends, tennis friends, work friends, and the list goes on. List 5 different types of friends you have had in your life and what they were/are like."

As a bonus, put a link to a new (to you) blogging friend and introduce us!

Well, first of all, I'm afraid I have no tennis friends, golf friends, running friends, or soccer friends. I have or have had friends who did all those things. but not with me. Second, a peripatetic life in my first 28 years and a tendency to procrastinate (oh heck, and I'm lazy too), means that thinking about different friends engenders a certain amount of guilt, you'll see why.
Here goes though.

1. Oldest Friends: These are the ones who form a group in my email address book, the ones I get together with each year (just last week! had a great time!), the friends who, in 8th grade which is a time generally associated with cliquishness and general nastiness where schoolgirls are concerned, showed none of that and took me in so that I could join a friendship that in some cases had begun before kindergarten. We've gone through a lot together.

2. Book Club Friends: These are the ones I miss the most from City of Lakes -- my small women's book club and my larger group from church, both of which I started meeting with over 20 years ago. We've had fascinating literary and spiritual discussions, lots of laughter, shared good food, gone on retreats together, introduced each other to books we might not otherwise have read, and also supported each other in illness, loss and other troubles. I guess I really need to find or form a new book club here.

3. School and College Friends: Since I went to three different high schools, I made some new friends in the two I attended after leaving the friends in #1. I'm still in touch with some of them through Facebook and because of moving back to the site of my third high school. I am glad to have had them in my life -- it would have been pretty bleak without them! I'm sad that I've lost touch with my first two college roommates, I hear from the third once a year or so, and Google has shown me that one of my flatmates has a gallery in southern Maine; and then there's Rick, the syndicated columnist in my Blogroll. But most of the people I knew in college I've lost touch with.

4. Friends I've Made through My Children: What a large and diverse group! Babysitting coop moms, playmates' mothers and fathers, fellow school volunteers, and later, even better, friends of my children who've become friends to me too (though not generally as close as they are to the original friend). Just another way my children have enriched and continue to enrich my life.

5. Internet Friends: I first started making Internet friends through genealogy. Of course, most of those turned out to be cousins of some degree! I'll always remember the guy who wrote, after we'd discovered the fourth or fifth family line where our ancestries intersected, " If this keeps up, we'll discover we were married twenty years ago." Heeheehee! Then came DorothyL, a listserv for readers, writers, publishers and sellers of mystery stories. RevGalBlogPals has immeasurably added to my list of friends, and Facebook is a way to find the missing friends and keep up on a daily basis with some of the other Internet friends. Goodreads is a website for posting book reviews, and although most of my Goodreads friends are people I know from some other category, where else would I have become a friend of a young woman from India with a Portuguese name who likes a lot of the same books I do? My grandmother was a great one for pen pals and writers' round robins (they would send their poems out and each recipient would comment) and my, she would have loved the Internet!

BONUS QUESTION: Well, I've got to introduce you to Kaye Barley, and not just because I'll be guest blogging at her place on June 1. I "met" Kaye through DorothyL, and hope to meet her in person some fine day. She lives in North Carolina with her husband Donald and their dog Harley Doodle Barley, the cutest Welsh Corgi you'd ever want to see. She is a sort of social facilitator for DorothyL -- even collects and publishes a photo page so we can see what each other look like -- and an insightful reader, plus she takes some great photographs. Go to http://meanderingsandmuses.blogspot.com to meet her.

And for an extra bonus, Carole King and James Taylor singing "You've Got a Friend" last year. Like me and my friends, they're older, they sing the song a little differently and maybe even stumble a little on the words or the chords, but it's still the same song of friendship.