Ladies who lunch

Today I went to lunch with a friend.

You know how sometimes you meet someone and you are so immediately, instantly, intimately connected, it's kind of like, "Oh, there you are! I've been looking for you for years! What took you so long?" Sometimes it's a love match, and sometimes it's just pure friendship, and in our case, a little over 10 years ago, it was an instant and genuine friendship.

She is such a good friend and I have known her for so long that I couldn't understand why I'd lost contact with her, why I - for God's sake - had her 2005 CHRISTMAS PRESENT in my closet. How did this happen? How did we lose track of each other?

Well, when I reached out to her, mounted a campaign in fact, 'cause her email and phone number had both changed in the last few months, it turned out that she was working through some mixed-up personal stuff that happened to her, not related to me, and other stuff related to Husband's Dad dying back in February. And then she felt so bad about not contacting us when Husband's Dad died that eventually she didn't know how to contact us. And, for her, things and emotions kept piling up and piling up until she didn't know how to contact me at all anymore. From February until, well, I started looking for her in September.

Me, all this time, all I knew was, I missed my friend. So I dropped by her office on Tuesday.

Which led to her confessing all the mixed-up feeling stuff. And us making plans to have lunch today. Which we did.

One of the things I said to my friend today during a long and emotional lunch, was, "You know, your problem is that you just don't understand - or don't believe - in unconditional."

She said, "Like unconditional love, you mean. Or friendship."

"Yeah," I said. "You're always weighing and weighing your relationships with people. Like, whether you're worthy of them. Or whether your friends are judging you. You've never been able to accept unconditional on its face."

I like her - I love her, unconditionally. Many of you are blessed to have people in your life who feel the same way. Don't fail to respect and enjoy and be enriched by that.

My point in repeating all this to you? Because I know - I read your blogs too - I know that a lot of us do things like not knowing how to respond to stuff, and then time passes, and you kind of feel awkward, like, how do I approach them now? And it's been, like, three months, do I mention the (death, divorce, fire, accident, loss)?"

And what we're doing is wrapping ourselves all up in layers and layers of guilt and baggage and pain. When, you know what?

Those people we're obsessing over? They would be so happy to just get an email or a phone call saying, "Hey. I was thinking about you."

"You wanna have lunch?"

ronnie