When Counting Blessings—Count Your Friends

I walked into church Sunday and heard someone call out “Hey, girlfriend!” Looking around, I spotted a woman from last Wednesday’s “Girlfriends Guide to Christian Living” class.

Her greeting made me smile with the memory of the evening spent with a new group of girlfriends of all ages. Last Wednesday, we listed the qualities of a girlfriend. The leader, Jo Perusich, wrote them on a whiteboard. The women called out: Honesty, Loyalty, Steadfastness, Can keep a secret, and Bathroom Buddy.

“Bathroom Buddy. I love it!” Jo said.

“Yes,” said the youngest member of the group, Bethany. “When you go to the bathroom, she gets up without you asking so you don’t have to walk across the room by yourself.”

Jo asked us several thought-provoking questions and we were to write the name of a friend and the incident. When we finished, she asked what we had discovered.

“I was surprised that I thought of certain people as friends,” said one woman.

“I noticed the same name came up several time in different roles,” said another.

The homework assignment was to connect with a girlfriend and tell her that you considered her a blessing, a gift of God, and how much you value the friendship. I thought about this and had an old friend in mind.

Sunday morning, I sat beside Sheila, the Memory Walk Coordinator, and shared the news that our walk total was now more than $18,000. After the services, she and I talked all the way to the lobby where we parted. We hugged each other, and suddenly I knew who I needed to share the message with. I took her hands, looked her in the eye, and told her that she was a real blessing in my life.

She got tears in her eyes and said, “You don’t know how much that means to me.”

I am so thankful that Jo challenged us to put into words how precious friends are to us and how much our lives are enriched through giving and receiving the love of friends.

When Jim developed dementia, I lost my best friend in the world. He was the person who always had my back, was always on my side, no matter how misguided I might be. Strangely enough, it was because of Jim’s dementia that my circle of friendship grew.

First, I became closer to my other female family members as they pitched in to help me. I became close friends with women I met through my Alzheimer’s volunteer work including three women I met in Washington DC. We called ourselves the four musketeers. My connection with these women—Jane from New York, Sarah from Virginia, and Kathy from Maryland—would never have happened if I hadn’t gone to the Alzheimer’s Advocacy Forum.

The friendship circle grows through my involvement in writers groups, in my business women’s group, and through work and work-related conferences. We have limitless opportunities to grow our relationships with friends. With each new friendship we open up our hearts to the blessing of giving and receiving.

In this busy, busy world we may not have as much time for friends as we would like. It is amazing how much a lagging spirit can be rejuvenated by squeezing an hour from our schedules to spend quality time with close friends.

copyright (c) October 2010 L.S. Fisher
http://earlyonset.blogspot.com

Green Apple Gum

Not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought of Jim since I met him in 1968. He died almost three years ago and remains with me through memories of the life we shared. Sometimes the little things, or pebbles, become lost in the big rocks, or major events. When something triggers our thoughts, we discover a pebble hidden by the shadows.

As I exited church last Sunday, I caught the scent of green apple gum. I smiled, and I assume that everyone just thought I was happy, or being friendly. In that moment, I could feel Jim’s presence beside me, and he definitely was not happy.

When our kids were small, they thought green apple gum was the best tasting gum available. Jim would not tolerate the gum in the house, or even worse, the car.

“Who’s chewing that stinky gum!” he would shout, as he glared into the rearview mirror at the kids. The offending child would roll his window down and spit the gum out. It became a joke in the family that Jim could not tolerate the smell of green apple gum. This is a man who liked limburger cheese, which in my opinion, smells like road kill. A small piece of green apple gum made his stomach roll, and he would retch if exposed to the smell very long.

One time we drove to Kansas with our friends, Rick and Sandy. We stopped at a rest area to get gas, and Sandy who had heard of Jim’s legendary aversion to green apple gum, bought some. “This will be so funny!” she said as she paid the clerk.

“Sandy, he won’t see the humor in it,” I warned her.

As soon as Rick pulled his van out of the parking lot and headed down I-70, Sandy started shoving green apple gum into her mouth until she had such a wad of it she could hardly chew it. As soon as the smell released, Jim whipped his head around and shouted, “Who’s chewing green apple gum!”

“I am,” Sandy said meekly, aware now that it really set him off. Without being told, she opened a window and threw the gum out.

That was the last time I smelled green apple gum until Sunday at church. I shook hands with the pastor and left the building. Jim would have hunted down the person with the green apple gum and informed them they were polluting his air space. That was the Jim I knew and loved, and the one that sometimes exasperated me.

I have never chewed green apple gum, and never will. I don’t have the low tolerance for it that Jim had, but a whiff of green apple gum pelts my senses with a pebble of memory. Green apple gum triggers a random remembrance of the complex and very human man who shared my life for 37 years and still lives in my heart.