Skip to main content

Friendship



Shortly after we moved back to Pennsylvania from California, I received a call from a friend with whom I had not had contact for almost 65 years. When I started school in a two-room schoolhouse, he was in second grade. Over the next six years we got to know each other pretty well, and became good friends.
I moved to a different school when I entered 7th grade, but again we came in contact when I entered high school. I played saxophone and he played tuba in the high school band. When he graduated in 1945 we went our separate ways, and soon lost track of each other. He became a teacher and I became an accountant.
After he retired he regularly played bridge with my mother-in-law at Luther Acres, the retirement community where they both resided. It was through her that he found out I was back in the area.
After his call Barbara and I began going to places of local interest with him and his wife. Although we didn’t all have the same interests, we meshed very well. The point is that even after all those years the old friendship was quickly rekindled.
Since we have been at Luther Acres, we have met many other folks who have become friends – probably more than we have ever had before, at least at the same time. I recently read somewhere that people change “best” friends every seven years on average. That may be true, but people here just naturally want to be close, and it’s a wonderful feeling; hopefully that feeling will last more than seven years. I think that as friendships get longer, they also get stronger.
Good friendships don’t die easily, and they are one of the most valuable things one can have.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

There Are Only Seven Jokes - Introduction

      The statement “There are only seven jokes – all the rest are variations,” has been around for a long time, but no one ever seems to know what the original seven are. I think I have found the solution to the mystery.       The answer is to be found in an article published in the New York Times on May 2, 1909. Entitled “New Jokes? There Are No New Jokes, There Is Only One Joke,” it goes on to say that all jokes are a distortion, and lists seven categories of distortion. Supposedly every joke will fit into one of the categories. I believe that repetition changed the seven categories into the seven jokes.       Each of my next seven blogs will be devoted to exploring one of the categories. In addition, I shall attempt to give an example or two of jokes which I think fit the category.       You must realize that this article appeared over one hundred years ago, so most of the jokes appearing therein are so out-of-date that modern readers wouldn’t even understand them. For example,

By Today’s Standards Many of my Teachers Would be in Jail

I started school in a two-room building: grades 1 to 4 in one room; grades 5 to 8 in the other. One teacher in each room taught all four grades. I don’t remember first grade very well – the teacher left at the end of the year. I am pretty sure it was not my fault. Now keep in mind that reading the Bible every morning was the standard for all grades at that time. But my teacher in grades two to four went a little above and beyond the normal practice. As a member of a “plain” sect, she considered it her duty to lead the little heathens to Christianity. She offered a free Bible to all students who managed to memorize 20 verses. I memorized my verses – “Jesus saves” was my favorite because it was the shortest – and got my Bible with my twenty underlined in red. That would be illegal today (not the underlining), and rightly so. Teachers may not teach religion, although contrary to what many folks seem to think, students may bring their Bibles to school, read them, and pray their
The National Anthem I have a somewhat minor pet peeve. I say minor because in the grand scheme of things neither I nor society will do anything substantive about it, so my best bet is probably to suck it up and move on. Perhaps after writing about it I can lay it to rest. It came up recently while I was working out at our Wellness Center. A program on television was playing America The Beautiful , and I remarked to a lady I have known for 40 years that I thought that should be the National Anthem instead of The Star Spangled Banner. She replied, rather huffily, I thought, “Some people think God Bless America should be the national anthem.” At that point I decided, wisely, I think, to back off before an argument sprang up. Now I realize that The Star Spangled Banner is a very nice, patriotic song, but an anthem it is not. According to Wikipedia, “ An anthem is a  musical composition  of celebration, usually used as a symbol for a distinct group, particularly the  nationa