One of my favorite holiday traditions is in the mail - cards from afar that fill my December mailbox with messages of now from friends of then. Those special friends who form the timeline of my life, a card catalog of people who have touched me, often just briefly, but in a special way. Special enough that we keep this holiday tradition alive, renewing our ties each year, celebrating our successes, sharing our losses.
If life is a journey then these are Chaucer's pilgrims, a richly diverse collection of people who’ve shared my journey, each with a tale to tell. Friends from college, old office mates, girlfriends, teachers - friends I laughed with and cried with. Those who inspired me, those who grounded me, the ones who lifted me up, who believed in me when I lost faith in myself. Good friends, special people, each a part of who I am today.
There’s something innate in us as human beings that compels us to reach out and make connections. It’s the reason we live in tribes, in villages, surrounding ourselves with family and friends. It's what's behind the casual but heartfelt admonition we speak in parting, urging each other to "keep in touch". It's what Facebook in the 21st century has built a fortune doing.
But in my un-Facebook existence, keeping in touch is via postage stamps, through greeting cards during the holiday season. Over the years, December by December, I’ve seen my friends move through their professional lives, marry (sometimes more than once), raise families, build homes, travel to distant lands, and now increasingly, retire and brag about their grandchildren. And though I'll never see most of my old friends again, each year we write "we really should try to get together this year..."
Long before he himself was an old friend, Paul Simon sang about old friends in a 1968 Simon and Garfunkel album called Bookends. From the vantage point of youth he pondered "...can you imagine us years from today, old friends... Time it was and what a time it was... a time of innocence, a time of confidences."
I guess what my friends and I have tried to do is make sure that between the bookends of then and now, on the bookshelves of our lives, are all our favorite volumes - the rare books, the first editions, the novels and the collections of verse – all by those authors of our life stories... our old friends.
