littleorangeguy: Old Friends, New Birds

I love Michelle Shocked's song Anchorage, which on the surface is about a dead-end marriage but has a subtext all about the endurance of friendships, even those formed in a dead-end job:

I took time out to write to my old friend
I walked across that burning bridge
Mailed my letter off to Dallas
But her reply came from Anchorage, Alaska
She said, hey girl, it's about time you wrote
It's been over two years, you know, my old friend
Take me back to the days of the foreign telegrams
And the all-night rock and roll
And hey Shell we was wild then ...

We have some of those friends with whom, no matter how long it is between visits, you pick up the conversation exactly where you left it. Often over a glass of scotch or a bottle of wine. Luckily for me, there are quite a few such folks in BC: one of them is Lisa, Kelly's oldest friend in the world (they were born in the same hospital in Martinsville, Indiana and then ended up living on the same street in St John's). And Penny, my best-pressed grad school friend. Here she is walking into the wind along French Beach. That's Washington state in the distant background.

Friends like this indulge you. They take you to the beach where you find giant driftwood.

Unfortunately it is too large to take home.

And they wait as you snap pictures of ducks way off in the distance, just in case these are life birds.

Which, you discover upon returning home and comparing them to Sibley, they are. Buffleheads.

BC is full of such wildlife. Frolicking wildlife.

Have you ever seen anything frolick like this?

It's a sand dollar on Rathtrevor Beach, where I went with my friend Cynthea. We taught together at Nipissing University in North Bay one summer 11 years ago. She taught the entire medievel canon and I taught American history from the colonial period to the (first? only?) Clinton era in eight weeks. It obviously took a toll on us: I've changed careers, she's now a scholar of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We meet up every few years on a BC beach.

A few years ago, Cynthea took a picture of me at Tofino where it looked like I was walking on water. I love that picture for so many reasons... This year, she caught me just as the tide was splashing in around my ankles.