YOU GOTTA HAVE...FRIENDS!

I couldn't imagine life without my friends. I have made some great ones over the years. They have enriched, and in some cases changed my life. 

There is the first new friend I made as a young adult.  We smoked lilac leaves once because we thought they smelled like marijuana when they burned. Don't ask me how I knew what marijuana smelled like. It was the 70's, enough said. (We did not get high but we did get headaches.) We drove around in her Toyota until it met it's untimely end when we ignored the red add oil warning light.  Who knew that failure to do so could actually seize an engine? Not us.  I have never been sillier with anyone and I could write a book about our many adventures.   She is the one of the most creative people I have ever met.  I stand in awe of her talents. 

There's the friend who taught me how to cook, bake, cross stitch, and sew, and helped make me the domestic goddess I am today (no comments from the peanut gallery). She's the same friend who also taught my son to say the  S H word when he was two. Well she didn't "teach" it to him, he picked it up by osmosis.  She loves my kids almost as much as I do and to this day they call her "auntie". 

There's the friend who coerced me into making fun of her husband's recent vasectomy by popping over on a night she was entertaining a group of friends to read a poem I'd written in his honour and to invite them to join the "Clip It" club.

"V is for vasectomy , that is what you had."

"A is for the agony, boy did it feel bad."

That's all I can remember. (Nobody laughed)  I guess they didn't think it was all that funny.  I did but then again, this same friend and I laughed all the way through The English Patient.

There's the friend I see only rarely because of the large distance between our homes but oh how I look forward to our yearly lunch date.  I honed my cheating skills at Uno and Trivial Pursuit long ago when we were all poor and she and her husband spent many a night hanging out at our place for cheap entertainment.  

I count you as a true friend if we have

• laughed so hard we've cried.
• taken part in some quasi illicit activity (like stealing a Dashboard Confessional poster out of a bathroom stall in the House of Blues).  Who carries a screwdriver in their purse anyway?
• pulled a prank or two together.
• pulled an all nighter (talking not drinking).

So thanks for the memories friends.  Let's make some more!