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.

Friday Five: Thanking God for You

Numbers three (right) and five (left) with me in the middle.
Number four, with Onkel Hankie Pants.
Number two, at Thanksgiving 1942.
Number one, with me. a long time ago.

Singing Owl at RevGalBlogPals quotes St. Paul and ruminates:

Phillipians 1:3 Every time I think of you, I give thanks to my God.

I'm musing about giving thanks for people today, partly because Americans celebrated our annual Thanksgiving holiday yesterday (I try not to just make this holiday "turkey day" even though its main feature seems to be eating till one is nearly comatose) and partly because I read the above verse this morning. It started me thinking about individuals in my life for whom I give thanks. For this post-Thanksgiving Day Friday Five, share with us "Five People For Whom You Give Thanks to God" and maybe tell us why they are significant.

I have many, many people in my life for whom I'm thankful, so it's hard to choose just five. I'm writing a bit about two who are gone and three who are still with us.

1. Thank God for Mama. My mother has been gone for 21 years now. I took her for granted for a long time, until I grew up and learned that some other people's mothers were not as loving, supportive, and generally non-neurotic as the one I was blessed with. I am grateful that I had her as long as I did even though I wish she could still be here.

2. Thank God for Grammie.

I also had the good fortune to be blessed with a very special grandmother. She did all the traditional grandmotherly things like knitting mittens, making quilts, baking molasses cookies, frying doughnuts, and making popcorn balls at Christmas. She also read widely, wrote and sold poetry and free-lance essays and articles, knew all the birds and plants and was a keen observer of nature on the farm. She never wanted to stop learning and connecting with new people. If she were alive now, I'm sure she would have a blog and a lot of cyberfriends and would be emailing her grandchildren and great-grandchildren regularly. She has been a model and inspiration for me and her other grandchildren always.

3. Thank God for Sisterfilms.

I have three children, and they are all my favorites for different reasons. But the youngest, known on these pages as Sisterfilms, calls me almost every day and so she is a daily delight. It wasn't always easy for her being the baby sister to two such strong and gifted personalities as SonShineIn and Cordeliaknits. Now, at almost 24, she is really coming into her own. She has astonishing insights into people, theology, films, music, and current events. AND, she says she'll take care of me when I'm old, if I need her to.

4. Thank God for The CPA.

My friend Constance, known on this blog as The CPA because that's her profession, is one of several friends I've had since eighth grade. I've written before about how these girls (as we then were) took me in as a new friend at a time in life when girls tend to be clique-y and not so nice. So I can't ever really choose a "favorite" among these oldest friends -- each has her own endearing qualities, and with all of them I have our years of history. But The CPA is special partly because -- as we all agree -- she is so good. She's the one who always responds to emails, who thinks of the thoughtful thing to do for someone who needs it, shares her financial expertise when asked, and who always loads the dishwasher because she's so good at it -- and then manages to sneakily finish the rest of the cleanup. Lest you think she sounds like an impossible goody-goody, that's not the case. She's also a lot of fun to be with, and can make a snarky comment when it's called for. Conversations with her are always stimulating, whether humorous or intellectual. I wish she didn't live on the Left Coast, but then again it's fun to visit her there and she does get out this way now and then.

5. Thank God for Punster Pastor.

For twenty-five years I was privileged to have Bob, here referred to as Punster Pastor for a tendency to pulpit punning, as my minister and friend. For most of those years we met monthly over the church newsletter. He baptized two of my children and confirmed all three; he helped both me and OHP grieve the deaths of our parents. Of course, a lot of ministers do that. But how many would know that the perfect gift for someone flying to her father's funeral (four months after her mother's) would be a packet of gum for the plane and a book of Ole and Lena jokes? They were exactly what I needed. Thanks, Bob, and thank God for you.

What I Did on My Spring Vacation

Sisterknits has been scolding me for my slackness in bloggage (bloggification?) and I must plead guilty. It's even worse because I've been regularly checking others' blogs and grumbling to myself when they weren't updated. So, here's the first of my catch-up blogs, reporting, some time after the fact, on my spring vacation to South Carolina.

Some might say that I do not need a vacation, not being gainfully employed, and I wouldn't argue. I certainly don't need one as much as the friends I vacation with, who all work very hard. But it's always nice to visit a different place, to see old friends, to do different things -- and then to come home.

We all arrived in Savannah on May 13 within an hour or so of each other, and piled into a rented Chevy Malibu (fantastic gas mileage) for the trip to An Island off Beaufort, SC. On the way we stopped at the supermarket and the Gay Fish Co. for food and shrimp, and Dempsey's farmstand for strawberries. On arrival, began the week of rest and relaxation combined with some cooking and just a bit of sight-seeing.

Some of the things we cooked: The Decorator, whose family has ties to Spain, made tortilla de patatas, gazpacho, and sangria. The CEO did the shrimp most of the time and made her special cocktail sauce, More Stately Mansion Brownies, and one special evening, Kir Royal with some pink champagne that had been languishing in the refrigerator. The Accountant brought a wonderful shrimp recipe from Lynne Rossetto Kasper's new cookbook, and I made several of the spreads I mentioned in an earlier post, from St. Martin's Table. One evening, Honorary Oldest Friend had us over for crab-stuffed chicken breasts and asparagus -- mmm!
Each year we try to do one "touristy" thing, and this year it was the "Gardens, Graveyards and Gospel" tour sponsored by the Old Commons Neighborhood in Beaufort. This is an integrated neighborhood just outside downtown, with both large and small houses and many inventive gardens. The graveyards (that we saw) were those of the Catholic and the Methodist churches; the Methodist one had been African-American since the Civil War. Both had well-prepared and hospitable guides who loved their history. Here's a gravestone from the Catholic cemetery with a sad story:


Lillie Small and her baby were lost as described. The baby was never found, but when Lillie's body was recovered a pair of baby shoes were found frozen to her skirt.


The gardens were quite different from those I'm used to. Evidently the paramount value in a South Carolina garden is shade. Instead of sunny gardens full of flowers, we saw mostly cool, shady gardens with many kinds of different (green) foliage and ferns. Just what one would want in a place where by mid-May it was about as hot as I would prefer in midsummer. Here's a photo of one of the gardens (I don't know why I got those odd bright spots, sun I suppose).
In the middle of the day there was a Fish Fry. It was sponsored by the Sons of Beaufort Lodge (Prince Hall Masons -- that is, African-American Masons) to help restore their hall. I didn't get a photo of the fishfryers, who were the Masons, but here's a picture of one of the young sailors and marines from the local bases who came to help out:

it brought home to me how we
in Uppity College Town will miss the servicemen and women when the Naval Air Station closes, partly because of the volunteer work they do in the community.


One of us had some knee and ankle issues this trip, so we didn't spend much time on the actual beach. But a little...here is the classic Feet Picture:
I even took movies on my trip, although as you will see I still have a lot to learn about moviemaking with my little digital camera. However what really excited me about doing this was the audio portion where you can hear the birdsongs. So here are two very similar and very short videos of dawn on Harbor Island:

and

And last but not least, a bit of atmospheric music along with a photo of what they're singing about: