Friendship

A wise person said, “You have to be a friend to have a friend”. I’ve tried to live my
life with that in mind.

Friends make our life richer, make our burdens easier to carry, our joys multiplied by sharing. Though we know this, how many make the effort to reach out, to maintain contact throughout the changes of our life cycle? How easily we just let go of friendships by inertia, by trusting that they will be the ones to go the extra mile to keep reaching out to us.
​
Friendships, for me, have been especially important as I’ve lived in so many different places. They have helped me integrate into a new neighbourhood or a new country and sometimes they came about in unexpected ways. One of the best ones is the friendship with my neighbour in St. Osyth, a small town in Essex, in the UK. She came knocking on my door, holding an envelope, saying she thought it belonged to me. Turns out, we both had the surname Davies, and the mailman dropped my mail off with hers. She also happened to be German and as I had lived in Germany, we had some things in common.

It’s also important to recognize that not all friendships do or should endure. Deciding which ones to let go is hard, but critical. Some are lucky enough to have maintained friendships since childhood. That was not a possibility for me, as I left my native Hungary aged 15, never to return except for the occasional visit.

Two of my closest friends are still with me, through the many geographic meanderings, children, divorce, remarriage and now my retirement to Grenada. Both have visited Grenada and I see both when in Chicago. Technology has made it possible to communicate easily where before we had to rely on letter writing alone. Some  Chicago friends are still friends, though distance, in many cases has meant the close bonds have loosened somewhat.
 
When first settling in Grenada, I had one friend whom I saw only on my infrequent visits to Grenada for some 43 years. Yet, the friendship has endured and now we’re closer than ever. Other friendships have developed through my joining organizations and my habit of inviting people to meals whenever I found an occasion, never expecting a tit for tat invitation back. The friends who have become more than acquaintances, now form what I call my “A Team”. We get together frequently, share our challenges as we age, laugh together, support each other. I feel fortunate to have them in my life.