Friendships and Crime Waves

An old friend moved to Florida a few years back to care for her ailing parents and she was up visiting the rest of her family this month. We had a three hour lunch on Wednesday and that made me long even more than I already did for a good friend who lives near-by. I have three very good friends who live in other states but the distance, of course, changes things. The warmth, laughter and caring about each other is still there, and when any of us gets a chance to visit, talk on the phone or email it’s always welcome and a good reminder of how important friends are and will always be in the grand scheme of things. But you can’t hug a long-distance friend. You can’t look into each others eyes and know when there is something one or the other needs to talk about. Yada, yada, yada. Since Don passed away---talk about putting distance in a relationship---it’s been impossible to fill the emptiness of not having someone to share life’s little details with which made lunch on Wednesday all the more special. We talked. We shared. We laughed and even shed a tear or two.

My Florida friend was married to one of Don’s oldest and best friends and I’ve known her probably thirty years, but we became closer after Don’s stroke. Anyone who’s gone through living with a severely disabled person knows there are friends who will run in the opposite direction when a disability comes into your life and those who will run towards you. She ran towards us and that’s more uncommon than you might think with family and long-time friends. Disabilities, divorces and widowhood change the dynamics of relationships. It's just the way the cookie crumbles. Some friendships fall off the radar, so treasure the ones that stay put.

Sadly, my friend and her husband are divorced now but we managed to stay friends with both of them. That wasn’t easy in the beginning because he went through a short period where he thought we should pick a side. Thankfully, they found their way back to being on civil terms again and I do my best to not carried tales back and forth between them. It works. But since she moved, I miss her can-do attitude and the ease in which conversation flows between us. She’s had a tougher life than mine but you’d never know it, given the way she powers through adversities. It saddens me that I only get to see her once a year and on Facebook. Good old Facebook.

Speaking of moving, unless you want to scare yourself out of moving, don’t ever look at a crime mapping site for the areas where you’re thinking about moving. I'll look at the crime mapping for where I live two-three times a year and it never turns up much of anything. This week I was killing time while waiting for my irrigation guy to show up to do my fall shut-off when I fed the address of a condo community I like into a crime mapping search box. There’s a registered sex offender living within the place. Great! I’d be walking the dog and wondering which friendly guy got caught doing heavens knows what to land him on the list. I kept feeding addresses into the site and at one point I learned there are over 1,600 registered sex offenders in the greater metropolis which, I guess, isn’t so bad considering the population but they sure seemed to be ganged up in my old neighborhood. You can see break-ins, assaults, drug busts and robberies on crime mapping sites, too, and comparing my current neighborhood with others south of town I realize how safe this area truly is. I tend to think of all bedroom communities to a center city as being safe but they certainly aren’t all equally as safe. What was an eye opener!

Back to friendships. The divorced guy in the couple mentioned above is talking seriously about moving to a state where he doesn’t know a single person. I don’t blame him for wanting to leave the Snow Belt behind but it sure isn’t in my wheelhouse to do something like that. I think he's under-estimating how important family and friends are in our lives---how much we all help each other out from time to time, how much joy we get out of just getting together for a few laughs. He gets credit for being gutsy though. I’m driving myself crazy researching an area I’ve lived in my entire life. I’d be in a loony bin if I had to research communities in the entire Bible Belt. His plan is to just go and roam the South (all by himself) until he sees something he likes. No research. No planning. If it were me, I’d worry I’d end up in the morgue, an unidentified victim of a crime, and no one would know I was missing to come claim my body. Five years from now it will be interesting to compare the outcome of our diverse methods of moving on with our lives. Good old Facebook, bless its heart, will keep us in touch.  ©