1. Long friendships. (Always in general, and today one in particular, which began 30 years ago this ... this semester, since we met in grad school. Friendships are possibly, probably, the most lasting, most dividend-producing of the investments I made there.)
2. Phone calls out of the blue. (One this morning, from friend; one this evening, from family.)
3. Friends who ask, "How are you?" and mean it (all of it), and listen well as you talk, and then tell you how they are (all of it, in a way that prompts you to tell some of your all that you had been holding back), and the place of comfort that is, that mutual full honesty, which might be so comfortable partly because there is also full acceptance. (Does that make sense? There's easy laughter, too, not the nervous kind; and there's the freedom to ask any question, and the respect of taking every question seriously, not in the sense of not laughing at it but in the sense that there is a real question there, deserving of an answer; and maybe one characteristic of a good friendship is the comfort and pleasure in doing that work together, the work of happily, even playfully, trying to answer what might seem like a hard or impossible or dismissible question if it came somewhere else. Collaboration of two identities that are not subsumed (or homogenized or some other word I can't quite find). And working like this, even on the small mystery of the increasing use of sentences that begin with "so," reminds me a little of those days decades ago when we were learning to be writers together, working at our own typewriters at the same table.)
4. A new book in the mail, with a sweet handwritten note. (From another Laura, who is a friend. I thought before sleep I'd just read the introduction and acknowledgments, which I often read first. I ended up staying awake reading several chapters, and getting up to find a pencil to start some marginal conversation. Also, I should confess, I brought home a book picked up at a secondhand book shop, by yet another Laura, whom I'd never heard of before. The "Laura" on the spine, I confess, made me curious enough to pull the book off the shelf. But some chapter-opening sentences made me want the book, just to savor sentences and study what they are made of, as if deconstructing a recipe. Like this one: "When Tom Go set out to become a man, he carried a Rand-McNally map everywhere he went.")
5. Band-Aids. (One of these things is not like the others, I know. Early in this daily experiment, I saw that awareness an audience (meaning an audience other than the future me and the ever-present God, who have been the only audience all along when I started keeping a gratitude notebook in 2007) changes things. It changes what I choose to put in the public list, and how I express it. There will be more to see, and say, about that as this year's work unfurls. For now, I'll say the Band-Aid here is an elastic choice, doing a lot of work. What work? That's my own homework assignment for a future post.)
What do you think?
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