I love stories like this:
Lifetime lovers Frank and Anita Milford have become Britain's longest-married living couple after celebrating their 78th wedding anniversary, newspapers reported.
[. . .]
Asked for the secret of their enduring union, Frank Milford, 98, a retired dock worker, was quoted in Wednesday's edition of the The Daily Telegraph as saying: "We don't always see eye to eye and we do have a small argument every day.
"But that comes and goes. We are always here for each other."
A few years after my father died, my mother said the thing she missed the most was just having him to talk to. He knew her life story, and she knew his. They were each other's biographers. I'd guess that Frank and Anita long ago passed the point where they worried about what the other thought if they discovered something embarrassing or shameful. They've had a very long time to live in the best kind of relationship, with no secrets.
The older I get, the more I value the people I've known the longest, even if there are gaps of several years when we don't see each other. They are both slow to judge me and quick to let me know when I'm full of crap. It is not healthy, no matter what some schools of therapy might preach, to reveal everything about yourself to everybody you meet. The more comfortable we feel with people, the more honest we are with them. Those who are very lucky are very honest with a few people, their true friends, and the most honest with the one person who will always say, and always want to hear, "We are always here for each other."
Let me give the last word to Roger Miller, a wonderful musician and songwriter who died too young, from a song he performed with Willie Nelson and Ray Price:
Old friends, looking up to watch a bird
Holding arms to climb a curb, old friends
Old friends, lord when all my work is done
Bless my life and grant me one, old friend
At least one, old friend
Comments
Bravo, Leo....couldn't have said it better if I worked at it for lo, these 54 years!
Another song I recall is OLD FRIENDS by Simon & Garfunkel:
Old friends, old friends,
Sat on their parkbench like bookends.
A newspaper blown through the grass
Falls on the round toes
of the high shoes of the old friends.
Old friends, winter companions, the old men
Lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sunset.
The sounds of the city sifting through trees
Settle like dust on the shoulders of the old friends.
Can you imagine us years from today,
Sharing a parkbench quietly
How terribly strange to be seventy.
Old friends, memory brushes the same years,
Silently sharing the same fears.
***
My second oldest (same age actually) best friend in Delaware reminds me of this song, and it's quickly becoming our "anthem" of sorts...lol.
Some friends drifted away....some keep in touch sporadically, but there are always "those" Friends (with a capital *F*) that endure like a literary masterpiece.
Having lost my oldest, best friend (who I actually knew LONGER than my father) two years ago around Christmas, still hits home as much as when my parents passed (20 years apart -1978/1998- I might add), and yeah...I STILL miss all THREE of them....every day.
True Friends are AS family...no getting around it.
B.G.