[Ed Note: I have been informed my previous posts may be housing GSP errors (grammar, spelling, punctuation). *sigh* no doubt. I will endeavor to review and correct, but the point of my exercise is more creative than editorial, and so no promises are made. Thank you as always for your correspondence.]

[Photo by me: Shinkai in the Kiso District of Japan.]

My retirement is now more than a year old, and that alone leaves so much to talk about. I have pretty much stayed away from my old career and most of my business contacts. I’ve changed my LinkedIn profile to “gone fishing,” I’ve had a couple of lunches here and there with old staffers mostly centered around their onward job searches. And that’s been super healthy from my perspective.

Yesterday I had lunch with a business friend whom I’ve known and done regular business with for more than a decade. She’s super busy with career and family, but we always took the time to lunch a few times a year just to catch up on each other rather than on our overlapping work experience.

It had been nearly 15 months since I’d last seen her, but ours is one of those wonderful friendships where catching up comes quick and easy; we each have a hierarchy of questions to ask, news to share and stories to tell.

Sadly, her news was in great part of loss that she was managing through. The death of a parent, an uncle and a close friend, all within a very brief period of time. Sharing these stories reminds us of our own losses or our sense of impending loss as our circle around us ages and declines in health.

We had our “regular table” in the front window where the urban street scene passed us by and where we had a sense of great privacy from the world as we each opened up in turn about husbands, friends, health, grieving, separating, coping and all that life has to offer. In what seemed like an instant, an hour and a half had passed by and she needed to return to work while I had the great luxury of wandering off into the warm afternoon sunlight, determined to find the quietest path homeward across a bustling Monday afternoon in the city.

It’s likely I won’t see her again until the fall or winter. Our lives around us will have changed, evolved, morphed. Lives will no doubt have been lost, the world will continue to spin and for sure chaos will remain the order of the day. But I will look forward to sitting close to her over food, sharing our confidences straight from the heart, understanding the impact and weight of each story. Ours is a very special friendship, unlike many of my others, not requiring daily chats or even monthly zooms, but only this simple act of lunch once every several months. We are two adults who feel connected by shared experiences but our true connection runs so much deeper — in the support I know we feel for each other’s life experience beyond us two but share intimately in our own safe space — my friend and my counselor