Blog 291 – 05.10.2016

I never watched the long running hit TV sitcom Golden Girls very much but I loved the song “Thank You For Being A Friend.” A true friend is a treasure impossible to measure. I still listen to the theme from Golden Girls now and again and still tear up a bit when the line plays, “When we’re old…have no fear even though it’s hard to hear I will stand real close and say, ‘Thank you for being a friend’.”

I think a great part of my motivation to write comes from a real desire to be a good friend.  I grew up in an era when friends wrote notes to one another and promised to write when they moved away from one another. I watched one of my favorite movies again yesterday, “Hearts In Atlantis.” It is a great movie about a boy and girl who are very good friends and when they are about to be separated they promise to write one another but don’t. Sometimes those early friendships are so strong they last a lifetime even without staying in touch.

Thanks to Social Media I have reconnected with many of my friends from the past and get to be again a small part of their lives. Through my writing I hope to someday be a part of a lot of people’s lives. Every story I share, every phrase I polish, trying to get it right, is an attempt to leave the best of me with my friends. My children are the best of me but in an equally valid and real sense my thoughts and my words are the best of me too.

Trying to present my thoughts and words to you in an entertaining and easily understandable way is to me what being a writer is. My gifts to you are the words straight from my heart to yours. Some of these words may echo after I have left the stage. For example I met C.S. Lewis, one of my favorite writers, about ten years after he died on my thirteenth birthday, November 22, 1963. John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley also died that day.

I met Lewis in 1973 through his writing that survived him. I have read everything I could find that he wrote and his friendship has been as dear to me as if we had walked together and eaten together. He put the best of himself into his writing and I am richer for it. Perhaps someday someone will feel that way about a long departed writer guy they might met through my words. Thank you for being a friend.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White