the best mirror

"The best mirror is an old friend." --George Herbert

The best and the kindest! Last month I had the joy of spending a brief 36 hours with two old friends and their four beautiful children. We had been very close during those magic years when babies are being born, first houses are bought, life is full of birthday cakes and playgrounds, anxious calls to the pediatrician, sleepless nights with crying infants, sticky toddlers and first words. We vacationed together, prayed together, renovated old houses together, and pretty much lived in each others' pockets for several years. Last month we laughed over old memories, caught up on news, told outrageous stories and remembered why we were such famous friends.

I have come to believe that the closest thing to time travel that has ever been discovered is a reunion with old friends. While Ron and Rhonda probably looked like any mid-forties couple to the man on the street, to me they looked exactly like they did 17 years ago the summer we first met. Although almost every circumstance of our lives had changed, nothing had changed about our friendship.

Our children renewed their friendships differently; they have changed much more than their parents. Kids who used to have Legos and Barbies in common found they had very different interests as adolescents. They found enough shared interests to have a good time, but one of the unanticipated pleasures of our visit for me was watching my older children get to know my friends as adults, not as the "grown-ups" they used to be. I loved the feeling of introducing some of my favorite people to each other. It was great to hear my 18 year old pronounce Ron, "one of the funniest people I have ever met."

I find aging a puzzling and disconcerting process. External things about me keep changing, and the prognosis for my condition, humanity, is not good. But there is a core - I guess it's what theologians call the soul - that stays the same. I feel a separateness from my "outside man", in the words of the dear old King James. My inner man is renewed daily, and I am at some untouchable center the same person who gave that high school commencement speech, who taught that first freshman speech class with fear and trepidation, who gave birth to that first baby one afternoon almost 19 years ago.

Nothing underscores that continuity like a reunion with old friends. Yes, that forty five year old across the table is the same guy I prayed with so many times years ago!! Yes, that is my dear old friend with whom I engaged in so many friendly competitions, and if we each had a baby today we'd be fiercely comparing which one weighed more, who smiled first, who slept through the night first, who got more compliments from strangers at the grocery store!!! What a joy to find that, indeed some things never change!

James Boswell wrote that, "A companion loves some agreeable qualities which a man may possess, but a friend loves the man himself." I know that to be true, and I also find that nothing reveals "the man himself" like the mirror of an old friend.