To paraphrase Emily Dickinson, I measure every happiness I meet, and friendship is one happiness that helps mightily to keep despair away, especially now.
My friends occupy a range of ages and genders and spectrums of affinity. They call forth several of my personas (not one of us is monochrome). Even when I have not seen them for a while, their loyalty to and influence on me hovers close by.
In my shapeshifting, I can talk politics, movies, books, friendships, history, Groucho Marx and W.C. Fields, dogs, war, education and teaching, the end of Empire, religion and theology, family, the stars, the recent past, the deep past, AI, oligarchs, Shakespeare, Romans, craftsmanship and building, Nazis, death, disease, Florence and Paris, Maine and the American West, poetry, wolves, birds and lions and tigers and bears and oh my how such talk eases loneliness and banishes alienation.
The personal can never restrain the forces of history, but it can carve out some space for conversation and affection, even if that space is only an air bubble briefly impervious to the turbulence and angst swirling everywhere in the zeitgeist. Any respite is a good respite.
