lost friends

A Year in Perspective

December 31, 2008

Like many people, I’ve been dwelling today on my year’s highlights and lowlights. Besides the most important and obvious — the health and love of my family, I keep thinking about what it means to have rekindled long-lost friendships with a handful of high school friends.

They’re not just people I like because of our good times together way back when, but I admire them for who they were and even more for what they’ve become.

Though they live far away, the expression “my friends” never sounded more resonant and meaningful than at this moment.

And in these perilous financial times, I’m also thankful that I’m not the toothless man I saw today a block from my house. Gaunt and younger than me, he stopped his bike and examined an orange next to the street. (An orange on the ground in Portland is indeed odd.) He smelled and squeezed it, then tossed away the fruit. Read More

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Blown Far on the Wind

October 3, 2008

I have a high school friend named Jim. I haven’t seen him in nearly four decades. In fact, none of our other friends have seen him in years. This protracted absence gives Jim a leg up on the rest of us: he’s frozen in our minds as he was back then, young and good-natured and athletic.

People have a way of drifting off after high school and college, not by design, but more like dandelion seeds on a puff of wind. We end up where we do, looking forward and not back. At least until the weight of so many passing years reverses everything, and we try to put the flower back together. Read More

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