One of the nice dividends of being older is that one has gained some treasured long-term friends over the years. These are people who remember you when life was filled with children, but pockets were relatively empty. What you shared with them was not life’s bounties but the chicken pox, the broken down car, the husband on a business trip when all the toilets stopped up, the dreaded Halloween party at school, and the rebellious teenager. They knew you when you were thinner, faster, and could be seen with hair jammed under a baseball hat in a pair of sweat pants and not stop traffic. You laughed with those friends around a kitchen table holding a cup of coffee, while the kids did Lord-only-knows-what upstairs. They remember the child, now 50 years old, as a baby, and the one, now 48, learning to ride a bicycle. In turn you can see in that hair-receding, slightly overweight man, the skinny child who took his first hesitant strokes in a summer swimming pool. Over the years you may have grown apart socially and politically, but underneath it all there will always be the thread of a shared youth almost half a century past.
Then there are the new friends. These are people who you have met later in life. Rather than knowing the building blocks of their life, you have met them when the building was almost complete. The joy with these friends is that you can slowly share over time what has made them the delightful people they are. You can explore lives lived differently, and from a perspective not possible at twenty-five. You live in the present with these friends, and can sit around that same kitchen table with a cup of coffee yet the children are not upstairs, but out having lives of their own. These friends are rare finds at this stage of life, but all the more treasured for it.
But one thing is true about both kinds of friends. They are a valuable and precious commodity, and their presence in one’s life should never be taken lightly, but treated as one of life’s great gifts.