Once a year I meet with a friend for whom I have the dearest regard - a wonderful mother of two and caretaker of her 90+ yearold mother. She and her family, (husband and 2 lads) used to meet our family of 2 boys - they are just about the same ages, - until our lads turned to a rambunctious stretching of the law, causing consequences that I (and Marlenes fam) did not, and do not, think others should emulate - Sssoooooo, Marlene's boys quietly retreated into other cliques at school, a few years ago. She and I have kept in touch and have a ritual 4th July picnic here in Wilmore, watching the fireworks put on by the Wilmore Benefactor, R.J. Corman. This is the business that RJ does - righting derailed train cars. His operation is in Nicholasville, the neighboring town, and has done very very, well - one of the bigger employers of the area. He built an airport for the private jet - at right, and has been a great source of funds for this and that. His fireworks display is always fabulous, and he opens his (multi-acre) property for people to park and watch. Marlene and I do not park on his property, since the lines to leave the fields are too long. We park nearby and watch with a picnic and adult bev so that we can leave easily. Our conversations range from poetry, child rearing, adult rearing, and the economy, plus moral issues and the Catholic church or the Protestant church.

One only has a few friends of this calibre in life, and I love being able to pick up just as though there had not been maybe a year between our visits to one another.

How are these relationships built? And what sparks them in the first place? Is there any mechanism for picking the friend and manufacturing the depth of the intimacy? NO!! I choose to say, since my experience has been that such friends are born, nurtured and blossom, even without hardly noticing that it is happening. All of a sudden one can say, "There is a friend who is deeper and more nourishing than the others. Yes!!"