9 November

Friendship: Keep Swimming

by Jon Katz

  Lenore found a mud hole today, and threw her own stick in, and then retrieved it. Lenore loves life.

 Friendship has been a struggle for me, among others. I think it is especially difficult for men to make time for friends. They tend to be too busy, and value responsibility over friendship sometimes. I have made some close friends and lost most of them. Some, because I was not really available to be a friend. Others, because they weren’t. I lost several friends when I moved to the farm. They just couldn’t handle the idea of a middle-aged man heading upstate with donkeys, sheep and donkeys. I lost some friends when I got divorced.
  There are people who just flee trouble, something I saw a lot in the isolated families in hospice work. But real friendship has been a longtime goal of mine, and I am working at it. I think friends have to be patient. If you are a man, you have to value friendship as much as work and duty, tough for men to do. You have to make time for it. You have to be open. You have to work at it. You have to listen. You have to learn.
   I think friendship is part of the glue that holds life together. We all need to make friends. And be friends.

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