Thought For Food

My dearest husband and I have the best friends.  Wow!  This one is going to be harder than I thought.  See, it’s really hard to say exactly how great our friends are.  It’s easy to tell about the kind of friends who come over on Saturday and drink a beer and hang out.  Or the kind of friends who watch the Superbowl with you. 

But our friends are so much more than that.  If you’ve read much of this site you might know that last September our house burned down.  In the minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months since then we have been firmly in the palm of our friends’ hands.  They have kept us with them, safe and sane. 

While Bella was in the hospital, our friends kept Buddha and Possum with them, bought them clothes, school supplies, etc.  They bought us clothes.  They taught the grand-kids that when bad things happen, their world will pull together instead of explode apart like it had always done in the past.  Our friends changed the way they looked at their world and its possibilities.  They changed the kind of world our grandkids live in. 

We are their grandparents, giving them a safe place to land comes with the job description.   Our friends are a different story.  They didn’t have to do that.  They didn’t have to do any of the things they did and they would have still been our friends and we would have still loved them just the same.  But they did do it.  They made a circle around our kids, all three of them, that made them feel safe and secure in a way that we could never have done because we were in the same boat they were in and at the time we couldn’t do it. 

Now, our friends are the most eclectic group of people you could ever hope to meet.  No two of them are even remotely alike.  We couldn’t have gone out with the intention of picking completely different people for friends and done as good a job.  And yet, they are all remarkably alike in several respects.  They are all fantastic people.  They are all interesting.  They are all interested.  They are all intelligent in the extreme.  They are all fun and funny.  They are all thoughtful and kind.  They all have remarkably different personalities.  Some are shy, some are extroverted, some are hyper, some are laid back, some are psycho, (ok, I’m in that category) some are insanely sane. 

But when push comes to shove, we move like a well oiled machine.  We have gone from single, to married, job to job, dating to parents, and now to grandparents.  And we are still here, still together, still a unit.  Sometimes we see each other more often, sometimes less, but we are always in each others thoughts and we are always in each others hearts. 

We all have our faults and our quirks.  We like that about each other.  It’s those very things that make us all unique and intriguing to each other.  We have differences of opinion.  That’s what makes a horse-race.  We like that too.  We’ve all made mistakes.  That’s why they put erasers on pencils.  That’s just one more way we’re all alike.  We learn from each other.  I can learn more from one night with my friends than I can from 6 days on the Internet.  And that’s saying something.  I’ve been to the end of the Internet and back several times now. 

I’m the oldest of everyone.  The youngest of our friends is about 30 years younger than me.  That gives a pretty broad range of perspectives. 

I wouldn’t trade our friends for anything on the face of this earth.  Not one thing.  Because as long as we have them and each other, there is nothing else we need, and nothing we need that we won’t have.  And as long as they have us and each other, if we have a dime, they have a nickel.

There needs to be a word between friend and family.  Framily.  That’s what they are.  Our Framily.  And if I had tried to invent them I wouldn’t have done as good a job.