by Viola Branch
Do you nurture the friendships that you have? Do you make an effort to assure that your friends know that you care about them? I have to admit that there are times when I allow work; tasks and life get in the way of taking the time to let the people I care about know that they are special. That is when I realize that I need to take a time out and get my life back into perspective. It is easy to forget that the important things in life are the relationships we make along the way.
Ah, that time could touch a form
That could show what Homer’s age
Bred to be a hero’s wage.
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
A few weeks ago I realized that I had not talked with my best friend for close to a month. We had emailed each other, but we had not spoken on the phone or seen each other for quite some time. I called her and suggested we spend some time shopping together. When I called her we were both at work. We were comparing schedules and having a hard time coming up with a date and time that we were both available. She announced that she had compensation time coming from work so she could go during the day. I told her I had worked several hours over time also and could take time. We impulsively decided to meet that day. We would take off for an early lunch and not go back to the office. My friend said that she needed to get a present for her mother’s birthday so it would be perfect to go shopping. She said we needed to look for womens clothing.
We met for lunch and spent almost two hours catching up on events in each other’s lives. We then went shopping for womens clothing for her mother. Her mother has had issues with her weight for most of her life. Due to this she has a difficult time buying clothes. My friend said that misses sizes no longer fit her mother so she needed to go into the womens clothing section. Her mom tends to pick out things that are over sized to help hide her weight. This causes her to look even bigger. My friend wanted to get her a jacket that she could leave opened with a shirt underneath.
We boast that we belong to the Nineteenth Century and are making the most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little this village does for its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us. We need to be provoked,—goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have a comparatively decent system of common schools, schools for infants only; but excepting the half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and latterly the puny beginning of a library suggested by the State, no school for ourselves. We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment. It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure—if they are, indeed, so well off—to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
As we were shopping in the womens clothing my friend was surprised to see the nice selection of clothes available in larger sizes. There were many updated styles to choose from. My friend was having a hard time making a decision on which jacket to buy and what size to get. I suggested a gift card to the womens clothing store and a lunch date for her mom. My friend decided that spending the time with her mother would be the nicest gift of all.