Saturday, June 27, 2015

Close Friends

Do you have a lot of friends?  What about close friends?  Best friends?

It puzzles me how time changes so many people and relationships, how circumstances (sometimes out of our control) can put real stress on friendships.  And I also laugh at how life sometimes comes around full circle and presents us with people who we were close to as children.  Perhaps we can thank technology for that -  Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Vine, Blogger, etc.

I was thinking about this yesterday.  Growing up, I had very close friends thru grade school and middle school.  In high school, I didn't really have super close friends because I tried to be friends with everyone.  In college, I had zero close friends and as I have grown older, close friends have come and gone.  Maybe they weren't so close?

I do have those friends in my life now, the ones I consider close, who I don't even talk to every day, sometimes not even every week.  They are the ones who you know that no matter what, you can always pick back up where you left off and continue on.  Those are some of my best friends.

Anyway, I am rambling now.  It's going to be a hot weekend and the 4th of July holiday will be the busiest week of the year for our stores.  It surpasses Thanksgiving week and Christmas week, all because it's on the first week of the month.  There will be many family picnics, family reunions and get together, barbecues and dinners.  Starting on Wednesday, it will be a mad house in the store.  I am somewhat thankful my last day at this store is on July 4th.  The store I am going to is bigger and will be busy, but not crazy with first of the month shoppers like the current one.

At my current store, we do a lot of EBT and WIC orders.  Many of our wonderful customers use their funds all in the first week of the month and they load up!  The store I am going to is the complete opposite.  They don't care what day of the month it is and come almost every day for daily needs in their households.  To compare, my current store is what we call a 1st of the month store and the store I am going to is more upscale.  I don't know how else to describe it without being offensive in someone's eyes, so I guess I will leave it at that.

I am going to miss my current store.  The people are amazing and I really like working with all of them.  My store manager is awesome and she has taught me so much.  I guess all good things come to an end so something better awaits.

I am working late today and I have tomorrow off.  I haven't had a regular Sunday off in awhile.  I won't be going to OKC on Sunday because I have to be at work on Monday at the crack of dawn.

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

Laters.

4 comments:

happyone said...

Good luck at your new store. : ) Is this a promotion?

I have a few very good friends and one in particular that I've known my whole life all 64 years of it. : ) She is more like the sister I never had. We don't see each other very often but I know she is ALWAYS there for me.

Since we've moved here we have become close with our 'church family' and love them dearly.

How know what you mean about some friends who come and go and I think this addresses it perfectly.

Friends of the Road
Why do friendships come and go? How does a once bosom buddy wind up erased from your address book? Is a friendship that fades away necessarily a bad thing?

My first inkling that some friendships are meant to be fleeting came in the spring of my senior year in college. My friendships there had been especially intense. We’d bonded instantly and tightly, with meandering all hours conversations about everything from the meaning of life to “What will we wear tonight?” Once I came across a line that seemed to express perfectly my 21 year old angst. It was from the novel Centennial: “God, he wished he could ride forever with these men. ... But it could not be. Trails end, and companies of men fall apart.”

Of course! Some friendships are meant to be transitory. Like cowboys who had ridden herd together for miles, sharing dusty perils and round the campfire coffee, my college friends and I had come to the natural end of our path together. It was time to move on.

Absurdly obvious, the idea was nevertheless enormously comforting. It had once seemed like failure to me, to build a friendship only to have it squelched by sudden distance, either physical or emotional. You move across the country and struggle to replicate daily long walks with phone calls or letters. Or one of you has a baby, and the minutiae of changing diapers transform the bicycle built for two that was your friendship into a lopsided three legged stool.
And that’s okay. Because in addition to our friends of the heart - the traditional, everlasting ideal - life is rich with friends of the road who, like James Michener’s cowpokes, herd with you for a particular stretch and no farther. These brief friendships are equally intense, equally necessary, equally worth treasuring as any other, and for the duration of that ride you can’t survive without them.

-Paula Spencer

Anonymous said...

I too have old and new friends, one friend I only see once a year but we've
know each other since grade school. Sometimes being a single parent it's difficult to make friends, in my age group most of my friends are married.
That was really nice Happy one. :-)

Have a great week Billy.

austere said...

I have many many hi hello friends.
But a select few close friends.
I guess I'm fussy!

Anonymous said...

Have a save and happy 4th of July Billy.