Gold
posted in OmegaMom, Socializing |"Make new friends,
But keep the old,
One is silver
And the other gold…"
Anyone who’s been to Girl Scout camp knows that song. I remember singing it (among others much less uplifting) while we hiked from our area of platform tents to the main mess hall for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. (I also remember that the much-sought-after reward for doing clean-up at mess hall was to get the "cows", the huge plastic bags that held milk for the milk dispensers, which made very nice inflatable pillows for the camp cots…)
Today I got a call from an old friend.
The sun is out, the day is warm, and I got a call from a good friend–what more can I ask?
Like many of my blogging buds, I am rather introverted. It takes me a while to make friends, and I usually only have one or two "good" friends at a time. Some were friends for long periods of time, some for shorter; I’ve lost touch with a bunch, which makes me sad.
I had lost touch with J–life being life, small kids occupying one’s mind and time–and hadn’t talked with her for about two years.
But last week, she called OmegaDad at work, having heard via the network that we moved to Alaska, and using her mad Internet research skillz to locate him. He gave her our phone number and various email addresses, we coordinated times through email–me being out here in the Final Frontier, she being on the East Coast, and many hours of difference dividing the two. And today, her being out and about on her own to go shopping and me being home after work hours coincided.
A good friend is the kind of friend who you can talk to for an hour on the phone after a lapse of two years and it’s like you haven’t been away from each other at all. Sort of like my faux Ugg boots, or a good armchair–comfy and cozy and…well, friendly.
We have, of course, been making tentative social moves here, reaching out and getting to know people. We’ve hung out with A’s mom and dad (A being adopted from the same area of China, one day older than OmegaDotter, and also in her gymnastics class), and it seems like there might be potential with S’s mom, too (another gymnastics bud). It’s nice to start feeling less isolated.
But still. Still, having an old friend call, and falling into the old, comfy conversational back-and-forth…ahhh.
(I can’t, for the life of me, remember the name of the camp, but it was in Virginia, we paddled canoes on the Potomac, learned to carve rudimentary artwork in redwood, hiked through forests, had sing-alongs around the campfire, and collected shark’s teeth. All was good.)
