Old Friends

Art Sale, Golden Valley, Minnesota

“We've been friends for over 50 years! Can you imagine it?”

In the way your faces light up, in the way the conversation resumes, as if you had just stepped out of the room for only a second, rather than the months which had transpired. For this moment at least, the years mean nothing. The Now. Unstated, but appreciated.

Last week I received a comment from a director of an Adult community center in Wisconsin, who wrote in looking for information on Frances Bruno, the subject of a series of posts I did last year. I called the woman who wrote and she told me the story. Sybil, one of the seniors who was in attendance that day, was wearing a distinctive ring. When asked about it she said that she had bought it in Rio when she was a skater in The Holidays on Ice revue in the early 50s. She also said that her roommate on that tour, Frances Bruno, had also bought a ring at the same time. Whenever the woman wore it it reminded her of Frances and of how much she missed her still, after 60 years. I gave the director Frances' grand-daughter's email address.

Frances is gone now. But her memory is not. The two old friends pictured above can still see each other and share some time together. But the important thing is not that they can still see each other, or that Sybil and Frances cannot; it is that they had once been friends–a bond neither time nor death can destroy for it only passes out of our view.