Should Auld Acquaintance be Forgot....

Well, the votes are in and most people preferred ‘a stash of knitters’, but there was some feeling out there for a ravel of knitters.

I was surprised that we all missed the obvious one – a yarn of knitters. This would work 2 ways (considering that most of us are, um, somewhat loquacious). We could also be a skein of knitters – so that would work, too.

Currently we have an old friend of mine staying for a few days. The Director and I have been friends since I was in Kindergarten and he was in grade 2. He is good looking, articulate, straight, witty, funny and a great cook. He is single.

His is also, I should point out, highly sought after, but rebuffs advances. He likes his urban life just the way it is. When he needs rural recreation he visits us and gardens. He weeds and prunes, mows and digs up thistles. The children adore his visits and he copes very well with small people following him around. We drink red wine and eat nice food. My husband gets on really well with him. In fact, on both occasions I was in hospital having children the Director came to stay and he and the Accountant went out for dinner and drank rather a lot of red.

This got me thinking about long relationships. Up until my 20s I complained that most of my relationships only lasted around 6 months (with a couple of exceptions which went on much too long!). Then I realised that I was too focussed on boy/girl love/romance relationships and that I wasn’t terribly good at those.

What I was good at was friendships. I put work into friendships. I had a number of friendships that had lasted decades. Many of my friends had been that way since I was 4, 5 or 6. They definitely outlasted romances. They also overcame living in different states and countries, they outlasted marriages (on their side, not mine). They outlasted fashion disasters, the sixties, seventies and eighties,nineties and noughties, careers and studies.

These friendships were both male and female. They were substantial and dynamic. A gap of a few years made very little difference to the quality of the relationship.

On one occasion, I hadn’t seen an old friend for more than 10 years. We slipped back into the friendship with no change in tempo – it was as if one of us had popped out for some milk.

These are not static friendships. They contain no competition (although there is occasionally friendly rivalry). They have no problem with different interests or priorities, even different politics. The wax and wane sometimes, but have remained the lodestone of my life. I value these friendships.

So while I am still pretty hopeless at romance, the Accountant and I started off as friends, then became best friends and then the romance followed. We are still best friends, but there’s always room for more friends, old and new.

So after all that, I am pretty good at relationships. They just weren’t the ones I was thinking of!