Friends

July is flying by.  I am still going to pulmonary rehab which is supervised gym exercises, three mornings a week.  There's a nurse to check your pulse, etc. and volunteers to make sure you do what you're supposed to and don't hurt yourself.  My volunteer coach is a woman my age with much the same breathing problems.  She's becoming a friend and I enjoying seeing her so often.  Most of the rest of the customers are cardiac rehab people who've had open heart surgery.  I met a couple, she brings her hubbie in and they live right across the parking lot from me in a second floor condo.  I've started meeting her in the pool some afternoons. She's cheery and outgoing and I like her a lot too.  I just pulled my head out of the sand and realized it was good to meet new friends and why.

Several of my friends have moved far away recently and I miss them but I've also had three friends die since last fall.  Two were mothers of my sons' friends from our old home town, and the third I met when I worked with her husband years ago.  They were all younger than I. Vickie and her husband spent hours with me and mine watching our tall sons at football games and wrestling matches. Our two youngest sons were like bookends. Blond, heavy weight wrestlers who also played football together.  The coach had to order helmets special for both of them because their heads were so big.  Those helmets are still just sitting there on the shelf since they graduated in 1992.  No one has shown up to fit them.  The stadium was right on the river and the wind blew into the visitors section with a vengeance. We'd pile all the blankets we'd brought up to our chins. Vickie and I cheered ourselves hoarse when the team won their homecoming game for the first time EVER when the boys were seniors. It was great!  She was a sweet, loving woman.

Bjorg's family lived around the corner from us.  She, like my son's father, was from Norway. They too had two sons the ages of ours.  She worked for the airlines and traveled all over the world. She was always up for fun and not surprisingly passed away having fun at a lunch with many of her friends.

I met Mary years and years ago when I worked with her husband.  Her kids were toddlers when mine were in high school. We used to go fishing in Canada with them and she and I would walk the beaches of Vancouver Island with her little boys. She had traveled east to be with family and have surgery on her shoulder I think.  She never came out of it. 

Life just rearranges itself without consulting us.  These stories are a lot like your stories I'd guess. This post rearranged itself.  I was thinking about how I needed to squeeze those 3-day weekends around rehab sometime, maybe skip a Friday and go visit people that I haven't seen in a very long time. Then it dawned on me why those people were on my mind so much.  People I haven't seen, maybe haven't called in awhile.  Vickie, Mary, and Bjorg, God keep you my friends, you meant a lot to us all.