{"id":2673,"date":"2017-04-20T07:11:49","date_gmt":"2017-04-20T14:11:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/?p=2673"},"modified":"2020-06-22T03:53:34","modified_gmt":"2020-06-22T10:53:34","slug":"lost-found-7-losing-friends-finding-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/meditations\/lost-found-7-losing-friends-finding-friends\/","title":{"rendered":"Lost and Found 7\u00a0\/ Losing Friends, Finding Friends"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When it all went down bad and hard, my attorney said, \u201cThe first thing you\u2019ll learn is who your real friends are.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He was right. It was a brutal lesson to learn and said a lot more about me than it did others. What it said disemboweled me and I was the one doing the disemboweling.<\/p>\n<p>I thought I had real friends. Then I realized that authentic friendships hadn\u2019t previously existed in my life. My crisis exposed this humbling fact within a manner of seconds, days, weeks, months. The exposure continues. I learned that many of my friendships were based on superficial foundations so utterly superficial that they required me to examine the superficiality in my life. That\u2019s been a painful examination to say the least.<\/p>\n<p>It occurred to me, while floundering in the darkest of days, that I had never had a true friend (outside of dogs), because I never needed one. I was an island without shelter in the Oregon rain. That is no way to live but I lived that way in ignorance. It also occurred to me, that during the ongoing crisis, I needed one, two or three real friends to help me survive in Astoria. Miraculously, I found them (and a dog), or should I say, they found me. I didn\u2019t deserve it and am working to honor the faith and promise they held out to me. It\u2019s a new kind of work for me.<\/p>\n<p>Here are some random personal observations on friendships inspired by my recent events. They are not meant to be prescriptive. I am merely meditating here. Perhaps they will create an oscillation within you.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I was a terrible friend to a friend suffering from cancer. I never once visited her in the hospital or at home during her convalescence. I didn\u2019t take the time to see her when she recovered and brought her new dog to the beach.<\/li>\n<li>I was a terrible friend to a friend who was embroiled in a lengthy and vicious divorce\/custody battle. I was never there for her or her son.<\/li>\n<li>Loaning a lot of money to a friend is not necessarily about real friendship. You find out how they really care about you when they don\u2019t pay the loan back and you never hear from them again.<\/li>\n<li>I found a reinvigorated friendship with my ex-wife. She is still there for me.<\/li>\n<li>I found a friendship with the owner of an RV park who may turn out to be the best asset I have in trying to rebuild my life. Imagine that!<\/li>\n<li>A text message doesn\u2019t feel like a genuine act of outreach when a friend is in crisis. I am guilty of that, too.<\/li>\n<li>I lost friendship with a neighbor and neither one of us said a word in either direction, although I kept looking for their lost dog long after they gave up.<\/li>\n<li>I found friendship with a neighbor that would have been impossible in my former life.<\/li>\n<li>I made the best friends of my life in Astoria. They visited me in jail and that\u2019s asking the ultimate of anyone. Actually, I didn\u2019t ask them; they offered.<\/li>\n<li>I made an incredible new friend of nature because she found my rain book in the middle of the big city. She recently built a driftwood fort on a distant beach and sent me a picture.<\/li>\n<li>I made an intriguing new friend as a result of my one night as a custodian.<\/li>\n<li>I think back how I failed a couple of students when they needed a friend and I will never forgive myself for my inaction.<\/li>\n<li>I gained my sister as a friend for the first time in my life.<\/li>\n<li>Rain continues to befriend me.<\/li>\n<li>When someone prefaces a conversation with, \u201cI don\u2019t judge you,\u201d they already have.<\/li>\n<li>Rapprochement is perhaps the best word going for me now. More rapprochement please!<\/li>\n<li>The word \u201csupport\u201d has little or no meaning. Or it can mean everything. It sure gets thrown around a lot.<\/li>\n<li>It takes hard work, gargantuan effort to be a real friend. Now I know how. I can do it.<\/li>\n<li>I often used my invalid, dying dog as an excuse not to be a friend. No one would question that excuse. Who uses a great dog like that? I did.<\/li>\n<li>I\u2019ve lost the following friends: Oregon Coast bookstores; my two photography buddies in Astoria; my burn barrel mate on the wildlife refuge; my great collaborator in art and life; my best proofreader; my wild Oregon roadie; a mad fireballing Oregon poet; all my former teaching colleagues, except one; all my former students, except one; all the writers I published, except one.<\/li>\n<li>My dad once wisely counseled me: \u201cYou make friends where you are.\u201d Where am I now? Where am I going?<\/li>\n<li>Gulls, eagles, deer and coyotes have been good friends of late.<\/li>\n<li>Next time I hear a friend is in crisis, I will run to them, not away. That running takes guts, like Steve Prefontaine down the stretch.<\/li>\n<li>Writers have less grasp of the meaning of friendship than any group of people I have ever met. And I would know.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.) <\/em><\/p>\n<!--themify_builder_content-->\n<div id=\"themify_builder_content-2673\" data-postid=\"2673\" class=\"themify_builder_content themify_builder_content-2673 themify_builder tf_clear\">\n    <\/div>\n<!--\/themify_builder_content-->\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When it all went down bad and hard, my attorney said, \u201cThe first thing you\u2019ll learn is who your real friends are.\u201d He was right. It was a brutal lesson to learn and said a lot more about me than it did others. What it said disemboweled me and I was the one doing the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2676,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,5],"tags":[47,125,126,16,127,6,9,48,13],"class_list":["post-2673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lost-and-found","category-meditations","tag-driftwood-forts","tag-friends","tag-losing-friends","tag-lost-and-found","tag-making-friends","tag-matt-love","tag-nestucca-spit-press","tag-oregon-beaches","tag-oregon-coast","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2673"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2677,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2673\/revisions\/2677"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}