End of Year Lookback Part 3

And last of all there are the friends you  made in during those impressionable years between 18 and 21 when you may have  THOUGHT you were complete but really you were changing with every one of those gloriously time-wasting conversations in every dormitory room or hallway.Maybe the people you stay up all night with are the ones who really come to  know you, seeing you morning and night, on glad days and sad days, whether standing  with one leg in the sink to shave your legs or dressed to the nines for some big campus dance.I went to Italy this past year with seven such pals where we were hosted by an 8th pal lucky enough to live there. Over the course of our six days together we talked about politics and movies, about the economy and the planet, even about our parents who once seemed to us so crazily forbidding or judgmental but who we now simply saw as people doing the best the could both with the tools they had to work with.We laughed a lot cried a little and argued too, in the easy familiar way of the long-married. And on the very last night , with our hostess Victoria unable to join us because of a business commitment, the seven of us took ourselves out for one final meal where I captured this 22-second video.Here you can see Judy being pleasant and Adrienne reserving judgment; Elizabeth laughing and Cathy speaking her piece; and Susan just rolling with it as Susan always does. And that feisty one saying ‘What?!’ That's Lynne, my sophomore roommate, who was always so funny and so serious both, and who never for a second suffered fools gladly, me included.So on this closing day of 2010 I say God bless ALL our friends, wherever and whoever they are! May they ever be at our sides![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVrDH6KSZf0]