Too Many

The worst part about living in a small town is the loss.  You know just about everyone, at least by name, by association. They are members of this group or that.  You know how they feel about life.  That they are fully engaged with it.  You share similar friends.  Values.

They aren't in your 'inner circle' of friends always.  They are the periphery.  You might like to know them but it just never happened.

In the fifteen years since I moved south, I have lost too many friends.  Some close, some in the periphery.  You have moved fifteen steps up that ladder.  It is that place where you move on to another dimension.

Mornings come earlier and you don't feel like twenty anymore. You learn of people who are sick, some with terminal diseases, some with serious ones that have hope for survival.  I have been down that road too many times.  You learn there is hope for some and then there is none for others.

I can not count how many people I know who have cancer now.  Some had surgery, some are in varying stages of treatment, and some are now ready to receive tender loving care.  They are nearly at the top of the ladder.  They are all female in their late sixties and seventies.

Many of my friends are doing a Life Review now.  Looking back, many with smiles, some with disappointments, most enjoying the moment and their friends.  Life is so about stages in this culture and I just wish it weren't so.  It is less in a small town.

Many of my female friends admit they are invisible now.  Some don't much care, others have tears.  One recently told me she wasn't cute anymore.  She still wants to be cute in her seventies.  She knows she has to matter more to herself than her mirror.  The mirror only reflects what the advertising industry has sold.  She doesn't much admire corporations. She does admire eclectic people, people who stand up and don't spew corporate personhood.

Several of my close friends have serious, potentially terminal illnesses.  Ten years if we are lucky.  They have been my anchor in more ways than they know.  They would tell you this was opposite of how they see things.  So they we anchor one another and I am fine with that.  They know the history under which we grew.  Social pressures.  Expectations.  So many opportunities.  Far different than the upcoming generations.  We are the baby boomers.

And we are slowly going through the turnstile.  Too young. Too many.