The harder the recent rains fell, the greater became the flood of phone calls and voicemails and text messages from friends, far and farther, asking how I was doing on account of our coastal paradise making the national news.
I bet you had friends do likewise—or maybe you were one.
The atmospheric river may have been Man Bites Dog worthy news, but friends checking in on friends is as common as Dog Wags Tail. And yet such acts of friendship, and family-ship too, are worth acknowledging—no, worth celebrating!—and not taking for granted.
A week ago in this space I chronicled how a Good Samaritan took 20 minutes out of her day, and drove quite a few miles out of her way, to personally deliver a package that had mistakenly landed in her mailbox.
If a kind stranger will go to such lengths, one can only imagine the distances our friends and loved ones will travel. I didn’t have to imagine the other day when, as the deluge hit full force, I received the following text from a relatively new friend, but already a dear one for some friendships are as fast and hearty as instant oatmeal, who lives in Northern California:
“Hey Pal, just checkin’ in to see if you’re ok. I’m just hearing and reading horrific stuff, and they start talking about Montecito, SB, and Ventura. I think the worst is over for us up here, but if there’s anything I can do, it’s only a four-hour drive. There’s nothing on my plate that can’t be postponed. Let me know. Stay dry, my friend – dj”
Only a four-hour drive! That, in a nutshell, is friendship, where distance and time are no obstacles. As Abdu’l-Bahá eloquently put it: “Where there is love, nothing is too much trouble, and there is always time.”
This quote often makes me think of my friend Scott and his now-grown son, Justin. A ballpark figure for how many youth baseball games Justin played in is 1,500, but father and son can both tell you the exact the number Scott missed: three—two of them because of emergency surgery.
Another sporting example of love being blind to trouble and always finding time is my longtime, and now long-distance, friend Randy who checked in on me from New York during the heavy rainstorm. In turn, I asked how his son Charlie’s tennis season at Merrimack College is going.
In a word, and befitting rising floodwaters, swimmingly! As a junior, Charlie is a team co-captain playing No. 1 doubles and No. 3 singles. And here’s the Abdu’l-Bahá-like best part of the update: Randy and his wife Debby, despite an eight-hour roundtrip drive to home matches, have attended 80 percent of them, plus most road contests too.
One final vignette of love and friendship, which are one and the same, ignoring distance. Not long ago, my college buddy Mikey was in Italy, in the coastal paradise of Sorrento, in a marketplace alleyway where he saw a man sitting with a typewriter. Knowing my affection for QWERTY machines, Mikey investigated, learned Paolo Grasso was a street poet for hire and requested one honoring my 20-year consecutive day running streak.
Titled “The Runner,” the custom creation is typed in Italian on one side, translated into English on the other, and is lovely. Even lovelier, however, is that Mikey thought of me some 6,000 miles away.
The poem includes this beautiful stanza: “This continuous running / towards a goal / makes the moment precious.”
Friends, shine or rain, make the moment precious as well.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.
