It isn’t uncommon for me to spend a couple hours each week talking with old friends who live far away from St. Joseph. This week, for instance, I talked for almost two hours with my friend Peg, who lives in Atlanta, GA. I talked for over an hour with my friend Carol, who lives in Bloomington, IN, and I spent another hour or so burning up the phone lines with my friend Judi, from Arlington Heights, IL. I’ll get in touch with Noreen and Anne soon too.
What do these women have in common besides their friendship with me and a penchant for talking on the phone? Let me tell you. They are all intelligent, analytical, middle-aged women with different stories to share but a common heart. They come from different stages of my life and don’t really know each other, but they are all one in their approach to life. They support their mates, their children, their homes.
At the same time, their intellectual curiosity sends them in varying directions, into book clubs and websites and literary circles. I suspect they’ll all be watching the upcoming presidential debates and we’ll buy telephone time to discuss them. It doesn’t matter than we probably won’t vote as a bloc; what does matter is that we share insights into how we think so that whatever each of us decides is well informed. And not just on politics either.
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