“Words are easy, like the wind; Faithful friends are hard to find.”
― William Shakespeare

Today over lunch, I have been eating a very clean, organic detox salad, nursing a migraine that has been courting me since Saturday, and lamenting the horror of Mondays, which were undoubtedly invented by someone with a dominant and defective Y chromosome.  I mean really, no one likes Mondays and yet they keep returning with chronic monotony to the collective depression of the masses.  In my present state of bleakness, I am convinced that one must have a penis to conjure up this kind of enduring torture.

There are precious few things in life that chronically return that continue to deliver fresh delight, but true friends are among them, and while I was really trying my hardest to bury myself in my work and lick my Monday wounds, along came Mindy, my bestie since middle school, in text messages, in my email box, on the phone, and in a package that she shipped for my birthday.   And within that giant box she packed 34 years of memory flashbacks in one thoughtful, fragrant parcel.

It’s so easy to rue the signs of aging, the march of Father Time against us, leaving his trail of evidence across our faces and our bodies.  It’s so easy to overlook the pieces of aging that have real value, like the friendships that have endured and created memories so rich that a single whiff of an exquisite Earl Grey tea can catapult you back to a sofa in a condominium twenty-five years ago when two girls ate Ramen noodles every night so that they could afford to buy cocktail dresses to go clubbing on the weekends.  They watched “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “About Last Night” and listened to Garth Brooks and waited for life to begin, the sweet ignorance of youth preventing them from seeing that it had already begun and they were already living it.  A mother lost too soon, the sweet and extremely naughty puppies, each time they drank too much, the boys that never showed up and the ones that refused to leave (and the police that refused to act on that), each tragedy, each victory, the shattered arm and the shattered hearts, each penniless moment, and every bad judgment call ever made, all weaving together an unbreakable, lifetime friendship, like sisters.

Time takes many things but it gives back in abundance this gift:  the gift of appreciating this moment, now, and the future memories created by embracing the present with full attention and a full heart, and the true appreciation of true friends. I am blessed to have more than one.

All of this from tea, Earl Grey, hot.  My cup runneth over.