EVOCATIVE CALENDAR DATES

 

Ever note the day’s date and feel there is something significant that you ought to have remembered about it, but you draw a blank?

 

This happens to me now and then, and usually it involves someone’s birthday who I have lost touch with long ago. Sometimes it’s a calendar date I made a point to remember for practical reasons, (time to turn the mattress, time to begin watering the yard, time to check on a relative who should have completed a last round of chemotherapy) but it was long ago.

 

Today’s date is an easy one for me: it celebrates the birth of a wonderful person I was lucky to have known. He left this earth, but his mark on it is alive and continues to bless many.

Happy Birthday, Abba

HOW OLD IS YOUR OLDEST?

 

Make New Friends but Keep the Old

Those are Silver but These are GOLD

John Parry (1841-1903)

 

Old friends remember details we’ve forgotten, and we do the same for them.

New friends allow one to reinvent oneself.

Both have important places in life’s journey.

My oldest continuing friendship is more than half a century and counting. A few months back, when I posted a photo of little me, (in the context of having been a cat lover from way back) she reminded me that I used to concoct, compose, and communicate stories about my cat’s nightly adventures when the rest of our immediate world was in dreamland.  

Oh, then I remembered. Seems I’ve been a storyteller longer than even I had recalled. Back then, as soon as I told the tale— it became a real tail. A few years more, and I knew what was fact and what was fiction. But the visceral memory of what it’s like to be an imaginative person of four and five came gushing in.

Because old friends sometimes know you better than you know yourself.

Keep the old.