Make new friends
But keep the old
One is silver
And the other is gold.

I can hear my mother singing it now, in my head. She sang to us a lot. Still does. We sang on long car trips. Like in a musical, she would sing her answers to our unanswerable questions.

Some one of these days, you’re gonna miss me, honey.
Some on of these days, you’re gonna be so lonely…

she’d sing at us, if we complained about, well pretty much anything. Or

Oh (insert child’s name here), que linda es la vida, si!

she’d sing to whichever one of us she thought needed bolstering.

In fact, my mother and aunt spent a week as children up in Vermont somewhere singing with the Von Trapp family (one of whom has just died). And life with a singing mother wasn’t unlike the Sound of Music. Only in New York, with only three children, clothes from Marshalls, not curtains, no Nazis or Austrian aristocracy, puppet shows or high Cs. So, actually nothing like that.

It does mean, however, that there’s a soundtrack in my head for most of life’s twists and turns. And the little round she would sing about friendship is in my head now. We have moved often enough that I have friends, people from different times in our lives — all over the world. They are still friends and one of the alchemical processes which mutate these friends into gold is how long and how well the friendship bears up under the strain of distance. Those friends in Philadelphia are closer in time and space than, say, friends in England or Australia. But they are all now, all those friends from all our different places in the world, old friends. Golden friends.

Here in our new place, there are some flashes of silver, too. That is hopeful, exciting even, the potential, the possible. But oh, the ease and warmth of old friends! Like afternoon sunlight.

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