FOREVER FRIENDS

What makes a true friend?  Loyalty? Shared experiences? Reciprocity? Dependability? Similar interests?  Comfort in times of trial? Acceptance of whowe are, as we are?  Probably all of them.

My first real friend was Ilene.  She was three and I was five.  She didn't have any close siblings either.   We played school and I was the teacher.  I learned what reading really was with our matching Uncle Wiggly books. Ilene had a health problem--Juvenile Diabetes.  I watched her mom make tests in test tubes.  She grew up, got married and died in childbirth at age 21.  The baby was lost too.  I hope I can meet her again in the Spirit world!

When I was nine my parents moved to Portland.  My best friend was Dolores.  We played dressup  and shared our fantasies about when we grew up.  Later, we entered high school and she was pledged to a social club that did not pledge me.  Later I saw that the kids Dolores was running around with had reputations for smoking, drinking and "necking."  It was a difficult choice for me to change friends but I knew I had to.  My new friend, Sandra, became the rose princess in our senior uyear.  I lost touch with Sandra but saw Dolores several years later.  She said that whenever she heard the Tabernacle Choir sing that she remembered me.  Maybe I left a good impression on her.

My next close friend was a boyfriend--Dean.  We went steady for a year when we attended high school.  I was 16 at the time.  I was a city kid who had just moved to a farm and was isolated from most of the kids I knew in school.  Dean had lived at a childrens' home for a couple of years after his parents were divorced.  We were just good friends who did social things together.  When I was about 20 he came home on leave from the Navy and asked me to marry him.  Remembering finding a beer can in his glove compartment one time, and that most of my uncles drank beer (you can't change a person if they don't want to change) , I told him he wasn't the person I wanted to be the father of my children and turned him down.  Many years later I got a brief phone call from him from a phone booth.  He said he just wanted to tell me that I was "there" for him when he needed it.  I told him that he was "there" for me when I needed it too.

Shirley became my best friend after I went through a divorce.  She too was divorced wiith children.  We both worked at a Safeway office in Portland.  We shared lunches and breaks, took walks and had long talks together.  We attended church singles activities together.  She was there when I first met Merle.  She was remarried about six months after I was remarried.  About ten years later Shirley got ovarian cancer and died a year later.  I wish I could tell her how much she was "there" for me.

My cousin, Pat is a friend I've known most of my life.  Whenever we get together we can pick up a conversation just where we left off the last time we were together.  We have had many similar  life experiences.  She even lived with my parents after I got married.  Not many of our cousins have been on church missions, but my husband and I served in Toronto and she went to Russia as a widow.  We are both active in church and have attended temples together -- both Jordan River and Portland.  We still write to each other occasionally.

My last best forever friend was Gayla, who became the world's best visiting teacher.  She made sure I always had a ride to our evening Relief Society meetings.  She would pick me up at the mission office and go to a park on some of my lunch breaks.  Once we watched a baby bird learning to fly as we sat at an outdoor table eating ice cream.  She took me and two other women to a senior citizen musical revue that was very enjoyable.  The year after we returned to our home, she and her husband moved from Toronto to Alberta--which was not far from where some of my relatives lived.  The next year we drove up there and spent a lovely evening with Gayla, her husband Gordon, and another missionary couple we knew in Toronto.  By the next year we got word that Gayla was suffering from cancer and later got a card telling us she had passed away.  That makes three of my forever friends who have gone through the veil, whom I look forward to meeting again.

That brings me back to my question, What makes a true friend?  A song from the past comes to mind.  "How deep is the ocean?  How high is the sky?  How far would I travel to be where you are?  How far is the journey from here to a star?   And if I ever lost you how much would I cry?  How deep is the ocean?  How high is the sky?

There is one more Friend I am striving to be like--Jesus Christ.  He is the model for all friendships.  He said, "If you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me."