Friendship, Updated: Sunday musings…11/16/2025
1) Cataract. No, not THAT cataract. The non-eye doctor cataract. A large waterfall or sudden downpour; a floodgate or deluge.
Just thought you should know.
2) Familylect. The intimate, group-specific dialect that emerges within a family. As often as not these words or phrases emerge and enter the family’s lexicon as language emerges in a child. “I’na huggy” ( I want a hug), “hangaburger” (hamburger), “by next to me” and “by near me”. “All’ve it” (all of it). “Just a quickie” (a short note or call), “Mary Poppins” (babysitting) and “jelly beans” (everyone gets the same gift).
Bet you can come up with a dozen from your family. Go ahead and share a few!
3) Leo. As in Pope Leo, the unlikely inspiration for a totally new Halloween costume craze for little boys who share the name. Admit it, in a world of K-Pop whatevers and Mini-Marvel superheroes, you got a kick out of all the 3 and 4 foot tall popes ringing your doorbell a couple of weeks ago.
Extra treats for them in return for those smiles.
4) Subdudes. Two for Tuesday, our bi-annual music project on my college email thread, is another gift that keeps on giving. Twice a year our “conductor” (who prefers to remain anonymous and unnamed on all things social media) sends us a prompt reminiscent of a long-lost radio program that played two songs from a single artist each Tuesday. We are tasked with finding and sharing our finds with the group. Some of the themes are just for fun (memorable covers, second acts), while others are purpose-driven (cheering on a beloved thread member). All serve us well by driving us closer together despite 10’s of thousands of cumulative miles between us.
Our prompt for this version was a list of some 33 “under-appreciated” singers or bands and a call to listen to as many of them as we could. From there we share what we’ve found with each other. This was new, as was the inclusion of a “guest host” for the first time, an incredibly kind gesture from our primary host to a friend in need of engagement and camaraderie. From him I received the gift of discovery: The Subdudes are a revelation.
There is at the same time no real lesson here, and a couple of very profound ones if you look just a tiny bit below the surface. My buddies and I are tasked with opening our ears and our hearts and our minds to new music, risk and judgement free explorations that also serve to bring an incredibly diverse group closer. Some of it hits the mark (The Subdudes); some not so much (The Jayhawks). All of it stems from a little bit of the same sauce: love.
Big shout out to DS and NN for all of that.
5) Friended. “Are you still writing?”
It’s been a little while, but I once again find myself drawn to the topic of friendship. Those of you who have given me the gift of readership know that this is a deeply meaningful topic to which I am drawn again and again. My prompt this weekend was a someone I befriended 20 years ago from whom I have heard almost nothing for 8 or so years who was in town at the invitation of a mutual local friend. Once close, we’ve added all sorts of distance to the geographic distances we once worked so hard to surmount.
Proof? I not only write, but I my scribbled drivel has lived at the same addresses for some 20 years. A friend would have no need to ask.
Friendship is seldom forever. Those that survive and thrive the tests of time are certainly the exceptions, as much as we might hope and believe otherwise. A once upon a time friendship may become so through any number of things, most of them bordering closer to the banal than fodder for Broadway. Distance and time likely account for a super majority of these lost or abandoned friendships, the vastness of both an insurmountable challenge. Rare is the friendship roadkill, a victim of some cataclysmic accident along the way. It takes time and effort; one must choose to invest both.
What of this friend, so long “abroad” who visited close enough, and remembered past closeness fondly enough to reach out? We had a very comfortable visit to a time and a friendship we both remembered with fondness. And yet it became clear that what we were doing was just that, remembering. We’d grown differently these last many years. What we shared was a lovely past. The divides in our present seem as wide as the chasms of time and distance that have separated us these many years. We share so very little now.
And what of me? What did I learn from this tiny trip to a different time and perhaps a different me? It will probably take me a bit to unpack all of it, but I can think of two things this Sunday morning. Looking out at friends found and lost, I find myself a bit more forgiving of those who not only moved away in one way or another, but who moved on from our friendship. Everyone deals with time and distance in their own way. Where once I couldn’t shake the thought that a lost friendship was a statement about me, this morning it feels more likely that it is more about the state of the friendship. I can look at friendships like the one I revisited yesterday with more fondness and more warmth. I should look at them that way.
Looking inward I continue to hold that one can never have too many friends, but I may need to edit that in one tiny way: one can never invest too much in truly good friends. Friends for whom time and distance are not obstacles, just speed bumps along the trip we are sharing. What it means to be, or to have a good friend is certainly for me to say only about mine. How do you know what makes a friend a forever friend, one you travel over any length of time and distance to be with?
Well, for me at least, my friends know that I do, indeed, still write, most Sundays at least, right here where I’ll see you next week…
This entry was posted on Sunday, November 16th, 2025 at 11:39 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.