Friendship – amistad, in Spanish – is the best. Especially the oldest friendships, because they’re the deepest, widest, richest, strongest. I’d even go so far as to say that having long, enduring friendships is one of the highlights of growing old.

When I first arrived in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, exactly ten years ago today, as a single and newly retired seventy-year-old American woman, and I actively made new friends in various groups (volunteering, folk dancing, sketching…), we were all, it seemed, in or around our seventies. Now, of those who’ve remained here, we’re in our eighties and truly qualify as “old” friends.

We may no longer be dancing together, but we strive to stay in touch. And when we have lunch in town, one-on-one, we keep it light – leaving the baggage of our age-related ailments at our respective casas. Our steadfast amistad and care for one another goes unspoken.

As much as I cherish my newer old friends in SMA, I feel especially blessed to maintain old friends from elsewhere throughout the world. And as stubbornly resistant as I’ve always been to computer technology, I thank the Internet for allowing me to keep in touch with all these dear friends so easily online, through email, Facebook, and this WOW blog, which I’ve been writing now for over ten years. 

It’s become a cliché, I know, but like most cliches it’s fitting (think of comfy old bedroom slippers): friendships are like gardens; they require similar tending. And this is the season of the year when this truth is most pronounced, a time when we make a special effort to reach out to our far-flung old friends in cards and notes and good wishes for the new year ahead, as if to keep our global friendship-gardens well-watered and in good health.

I have a fuzzy memory of my Scottish immigrant grandparents making us all join hands in a circle and sing Auld Lang Syne on New Year’s Eve in Morristown, New Jersey. I was too young to understand the words of this 18^th century Scottish ballad, later popularized among the Scottish diaspora, but I thought I understood the message of it – that auld (old) friendships should not be “forgot,” despite distances; that we’re meant to hold hands, hold each other up, and sing the same song, even across oceans. It’s this message that has stuck with me over the decades.

“We’re all just walking each other home.” — Ram Dass (stock photo)

So I hold fast to my old friends, the people who have shaped me and made me who I am, the people who know me best and accept me as I am, the people whom I connect with on the deepest, most meaningful levels. There are too many to mention by name now, but here are just a few examples:

• Marie-Laure in Paris: We met in the summer of 1972, when I was twenty-seven and she twenty-four, on the island of St. Martin in the Caribbean, on a tennis court. She and her then-boyfriend had only one racket between them, and I had two. Our lasting friendship and our many international travel-adventures together grew from that brief loan.
• John in California: Our friendship began with a dance at our tenth high school reunion in 1973. We hadn’t known each other in high school in New Jersey, but we’ve since more than made up for that lost time.
• Maureen in Philadelphia: In 1975 Maureen and I met when I began work at the public television station in New York, WNET. At one point she urged me to apply to Columbia University, her alma mater. I followed her advice, was accepted and granted a full scholarship. Her urging changed my life’s course. She has remained a soul-sister over the past fifty years.
• Ron in Los Angeles, Paul in Boston, and Michael in New York were once my core staff when I had a catering business in Manhattan, Bonnie Fare Catering (1986-96). Ever since, they’ve been like beloved younger brothers to me.
• Morgan in Montana: Morgan was my post-mate when we both served as Peace Corps volunteers in Gabon, Central Africa, from 1996-98. She and my Malian friend Youssef saved my life when I had a terrible burn accident there. (See my recent blogpost, “One Muslim Man” for the full story.) I’ve since, thanks to Facebook, watched her son Eddie grow up. He’ll soon be attending college.
• Sandra in Kirriemuir, Scotland: Sandra, a local historian, and I met in 2011, when I was doing research for my novel, JAMIE’S MUSE (based on the life of my Scottish great-grandmother, Helen David Black, from Kirriemuir), and she and I have remained in close communication ever since. She signs her frequent, long-and-chatty emails, in which I hear her voice and her Scottish burr, “Your Sister Across the Sea.” Her friendship means a great deal to me.

While leafing through my old address book the other day – yes, the kind made of paper, with a zippered cover even – I noted that a number of the people in it have moved on. And by that I don’t mean to new addresses here below. It was a sad and sobering thought, as well as a reminder that we’re “only dancing on this earth for a short while,” as Cat Stevens sings. For the duration, then, I think we’d be wise to invest in meaningful friendships that will, over time, deepen and endure.

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Wishing all my WOW readers, who are by now old friends, Happy Holidays! — and all best wishes for the New Year ahead. With mucho love from Mexico siempre, Bonnie