Playground envy

Do you remember what it was like to be a kid at the playground and make a new friend? The formula included 3 action steps. #1-Walk, run or skip up to the person you hope to play with. #2-Introduce yourself and ask them to play. #3-Go play. I watch my daughter make friends in this way each time we visit the playground. It works like a charm each time. They follow each other around climbing up ladders, slipping down slides and practicing their pumping skills on the jet black saddle swings.

As an adult, I long for this kind of simple connection with other adults. I want to make friends with ease too. There are many days that I long for someone to just play with. I don’t always want to discuss husbands, potty training, the failing economy or Angelina Jolie. I want to meet someone at the park and laugh together as we lazily lob the neon green ball back and forth across a cracked court. I want to lie in the grass and feel it tickle the back of my neck while we study the clouds and see who can find the most shapes in them. I want to kick a ball in a backyard and watch the fireflies flick on their lights and know that I can stay out as long as I want.

There are times when I was just sure that my new “best friend” was just waiting to me in find him or her. I remember when I transferred to Indiana University, I told my mom, “Just think, in a few months I will have a whole set of friends that I don’t even know right now.” That was pretty optimistic, as if the welcome committee was forming at that very moment, preparing for my upcoming arrival with helium balloons and bowls of finger food. But you know what? I met one of my very dearest friends on the day I moved in to my dorm. Like my daughter on the playground, Veronica and I immediately connected. We lived right next to each other in the college dorm that first year and she’s been a huge influence and inspiration in my life since then.

Sadly, there are many times when I go to an event with high hopes of making a “super new friend” and I find myself feeling like a major loner that will never connect with someone in that “like at first sight” kind of way. Which makes the friends I already have all that more important. There have been friends that I have let slip away. I didn’t put in the work to keep in touch, and they didn’t either. Today that just feels like a horrible waste, like throwing away my mom’s famous homemade German Chocolate Cake because I don’t have enough milk to drink with it. Well, that is just plain silly, lazy, wasteful and depressing.

This week I am meeting with a college roommate that I haven’t seen in a few years. After thinking about this post, I decided to call and try to get in touch with her. I left a couple of messages and hoped that she hadn’t written me off yet. She called back a few days later and apologized for not getting back to me sooner. We talked for a while catching up, our conversation expanded into that beautiful, sense of assurance that time had passed, but our friendship remained. I am meeting for dinner in a couple of days, and I am thrilled. I keep reminiscing of how I used to sing songs I thought were silly at night as we laid in our bunk beds in college and she would laugh below me, making me feel as if I were so funny and clever. Or how we talked seriously about the men we later married in that tiny little closet of a room in our sorority. I feel like I rediscovered this dust laden treasure in the attic. We chatted, brushed ourselves off and found that what we put away a couple of years ago still has a lot of meaning and love to it.

I am working on my own 3 steps to making and keeping friends. Hopefully I can be as successful and happy and my daughter, that would be a mark of a true accomplishment.