True friends share popcorn

Carmelene Melanie Siani

50plus Magazine

I swear, if I see one more article telling me I will live longer if I have more friends, more people in my life, more family around, and more organizations to belong to I will scream. Who writes these things? Oh. I’ll tell you who. Extroverts.

I’m a person who considers a vacation at a silent retreat center where I can write or draw or paint and not have to talk to anybody as the single best vacation possible.

I actually like my own company and — I have to admit — I didn’t used to feel that way. It took me a long time to figure that out.

I remember going to a party a while ago. The hostess was introducing me to a circle of women and after rattling off all their names, as a kind of conversation starter, I asked them how they all met.

“Oh, we’re in the same aerobics class at the gym,” they said.

I was dumbfounded. My friend had invited her entire aerobics class to her house for a party. Not only that — she knew all their names!

The reason I remember this scene so vividly is because I was actually jealous of my friend. She was so P-O-P-U-L-A-R!

I wanted to be popular too. After all, being “popular” — as in knowing a lot of people and having them all over to your house when you have a party — was what you were supposed to be.

Or so I thought.

I guess I got fooled by the notion that having a lot of friends and being popular equaled something wonderful, like being a good, happy, productive, wonderful, loving, kind, even intelligent person.

One time, a woman I’d met at a business conference called to say she wanted to get to know me.

“I’d like us to be friends,” she’d said. “Let’s go to dinner and a movie.”

She was a yoga instructor and a massage therapist on the side, and I thought, those being two things I was interested in, we might be able to click.

So, let me ask you. Would you be friends with a person who buys herself the largest popcorn they sell at the movies and tells you before you even leave the counter that, oh, by the way, she doesn’t share her popcorn and if I wanted some to buy my own?

“Not even one handful?”

“No. Not even a few fingers full.”

See what I mean?

“Is there something wrong with me that I don’t have more “friends?” I sometimes wonder.

When I retired, I made the conscious decision to finally not “belong,” to finally not feel like I had to belong and to finally not have friends who I didn’t consider friends at all, but just people I knew.

Today, I can count my friends on one hand. But — they are true friends. They know me. They care about me. They understand that I’m bossy, crabby, demanding and picky, and they don’t mind.

They also share their popcorn with me.

Carmelene Melanie Siani’s widely published stories on family, caregiving, grief, late-life love and more aim to help others see how life constantly opens to reveal lessons.

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