GHOSTS OF FRIENDSHIPS PAST

A strange thing happened in Idaho. It was not unplanned, but there were some surprising insights gained from these events.
When we had really started planning our route that covered a tremendous 3500 miles across the Pacific Northwest in a two week time span, destination Oregon via St George, Utah, I had noticed that one path we could take would put us within breathing distance of two people I had not seen in a very long time. So I made contact, and plans to meet up, with an old friend in Boise and an old boss in Nampa.
I really didn't think much of it at the time, just that I was excited to see these people I had not seen in a long, long time. L and I met through my best friend, J, back in the nineties, and I had always really liked her. She kind of knew me "before", though, before all this life changing shit happened to me and I became a person I don't know that I would have recognized. Physically, I am somewhat the same - several old friends remark when they see me that I look exactly the same as I did in high school - but there are so many changes inside my soul and, in my perception, to my youthful looks, that I rarely feel like that person L probably knew in the day.
L herself has changed a lot since I had made friends with her, as well, but even though her appearance seemed to have changed drastically, I recognized her readily when she arrived at the park we agreed to meet at in Boise. I don't even know that talking to her, I recognized either one of the people we used to be in the conversation, except in the parallel care and concerns we had for our shared mutual friends. My mind was sparked by talking to her, though, and I really enjoyed it and didn't want it to end. However, the boys were restless, and we spent probably less than an hour with her, though I probably could have spent the whole weekend getting to know her again.
Then, we went to Nampa, and spent an unexpected THREE hours with my old boss. None of us antipicated this visit would run so long (I had been promising T only half an hour before we could get back on the road, since he was anxious to get to his mom's this night). However, neither of us made a push to get going once we got there, and K slept through the entire visit. Part of this was because Shauna (the old boss) and her partner Mark are just some of the most darned interesting people you will ever met. Shauna is industrious and intelligent, and Mark is laid back and always curious about other people.
I worked for Shauna during the "after", during some really hard years in my life (I think it was exactly two years I was in her employ), and during some years that were difficult for her, too, in my opinion. At the time, she had been trying to keep her alternative health practice for animals afloat in a tiny agricultural town with a dozen other vets, and she had recently lost a business partner and lover, and a trusted friend and office manager who had screwed her over. During the time I worked for her, she had started dating Mark, and at the very end of our working relationship, had a child with him, who was a baby last time I saw him. Now their son was a vibrant, smart young child with many interests and talents, although he was very busy when we saw them.
Shauna and Mark have been very busy and apparently successful since moving their businesses to Nampa. She works out of her home, showing me her the clinic they built in stages that now includes two exam rooms for pets, and another for horses, with a large reception area. They have renovated their home with extraordinary results, and grow their own vegetables and hay. Mark took Ted for a walk, and then Shauna took me, and showed us solutions they had tried for various irrigation and weed control techniques, and it was all very fascinating. They were both in amazing health and condition, and we enjoyed fresh, natural flavors at their house, in the strawberry lemonade Shauna whipped up, a fresh bunch of grapes, nuts, fruit. It was very nice.
And then we had to get on the road, and I thought about this past year, and how I have confronted many ghosts of friendships past in the last twelve months or so. I tried to apply the filter of their experience and wonder what they saw in me. It's been these two, and two months ago, a coworker from the zoo I worked at when I met Ted, and an old professor, a boyfriend or two from way in the past, so many people with their own perceptions of me, most of which I would never know. It is a funny feeling to keep plugging yourself into that time and place, that you who you were at that distinct moment in time, when you were just slightly askew of who you are now. It is all very heady and filled with mystery, the mystery being really who you are as a person in this world, which we tend to think is who we think we are, but is really the combinations of all these perceptions. Who you are has less to do with who you are but more with who they think you are, which is not necessarily the same.
And I think I have the answers to this, but then they swirl around me , questions draped in purple silk and opaque veils, because even though I know myself more than my friends seem to, I will never know what it is I don't know, and therefore can never really know myself. Like I have said before, you hear observations other people make, and you have your own perceptions, but you will never know the things that are left unsaid. Maybe those are the heart of it, the vulnerability that exists within a friendship. But the outside of a friendship is wrapped up in the things a person does say, and in this case, it was hey, I am coming through, and I want to see you. I am so glad these two women accepted, because they were so amazing to meet and spend time with again.