Gift

What's the best gift imaginable?

Attended a conference a while back. My employer is usually penurious when it comes to conferences and travel for people like me. But this one was in town and my boss thought I'd somehow benefit. I didn't want to go; it was sponsored by a vendor and wasn't terribly relevant to my work. Besides, I've got lots to do, since I keep getting new responsibilities without losing any of the old ones. But orders are orders; I went.

Turns out my boss was right, just not in the way she thought.

Towards the end of the conference I was sitting in a fairly crowded lecture hall. A late arrival found the seat next to me. I don't much remember what the presentation was about, but I certainly remember the conversation that my neighbor and I fell into after it ended. Polite noncommittal comments on the presentation slid into professional issues and rapidly branched seamlessly into myriad topics ranging from current events to literature to baseball to history to music to electoral politics to family histories and on and on. The neighbor finally had to run to catch the train home to a distant city. Then exploratory e-mails wondering if the conversation was a fluke, followed by more e-mails, more exchanges, more sharing over a gulf of two hundred miles that confirmed a simpatico soul.

Sometimes the origins of true friendship stretch back into a dimly remembered past, seemingly as much a part of the firmament of life as the earth beneath your feet. Sometimes it grows slowly, framed in familiarity, creeping silently into your life until some anomalous event suddenly reveals the bond's strength. Or it can be forged in compelling shared experiences. And sometimes it bursts forth from a vacuum with breathtaking abruptness.

However it comes, it's a gift almost beyond compare. Friends are good. Very good.

Note: this was originally posted on ketches, yaks & hawks 3 July 2008