What Friends Are for 
Friends serve to delight and gladden, to affirm and inspire, to stimulate and energize, to console and tranquilize one another. I have friends for all 'intents and purposes,' in a manner of saying, but I must admit there is not one friend who can fulfill all those sublime purposes by herself just as I cannot be everything to any one of them.
Delightful and gladsome friends send me greeting cards on occasions and write or email to me every now and then. They seem to know my joys, my pains, my wishes, and thus also have a notion about my need for privacy at certain points in my life. They are those with whom I had spent a great deal of my time at work - friends on the distaff side who laughed, cried, and dreamt with me. We cultivated an ethos : proud homemakers who had jobs outside our homes; ladies with quiet resolve not to be overwhelmed by the vagaries of everyday life. Goddesses of our own hearths! And so, along with our wifely and motherly concerns, we celebrated our fiestas and hosted bridal showers, tended our gardens and buffed our porcelain jars, learned to make ice-box cakes and colored our hair. In this clique are friends mostly from my last employment in the Phils. - at LEYECO 2, Tacloban City.
And then there are friends who inspire me; who affirm my being me. They communicate in fine-textured language, expressing themselves with the lilt and dash reflective of the prolific and potent lives granted them by their talents and proclivities. In these friends I find lucent company on the Web, not to mention approbation and assent when I question the sanity of my various predilections, - writing poems or creating my personal website - which, I reckon, most other friends find off-putting, pretentious, or even absurdly self-promoting. In this clique belong the artists and the literati, the illuminati and the achievers. They're my Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem, Isak Dinesen, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf minus the suicides, Erica Jong, Martha Stewart, Han Suyin, Meryl Streep, Barbra Streisand, Coco Chanel, and perhaps Yoko Ono with her Lennon.
Of course, I can't do without my current office friends - they who energize and stimulate me, despite our differences in age, background, and propensity. They are the people I'm working with, and although I'm not privy to their personal lives, I'm with them half my waking hours, 5 days a week. The energy derived from my relationship with my colleagues gives warmth to the simple joys of preparing lesson plans and course outlines. We don't visit one another's homes, we don't go out for socials nor for entertainment and recreation, and yet they are an ever-invigorating presence in my workaday world. They don't "age" me; I feel as young as the new 25-year-old Ajarn in our Faculty.
Finally, there are friends who never communicate - no letters, no email, no cards, no calls, no visits whatsoever. But they're my friends, just the same. In this category are a motley from my college and high school years, some hometown folks and relatives. On those rare times when we do chance upon each other, some of these friends put me in retrospect and refresh my memory; others come forth like some fan or admirer of mine, who will either be gushy and fawning or trying to be self-contained. They summon me back to my shining, vital, glory days, yet in the same breath - perhaps without meaning to - hint at my physical reversal : my coping with the onslaught of inevitable greying years. These friends, no doubt, have a consoling and tranquilizing effect on me, as they acquaint me unknowingly, with my own mortality.
... that's what friends are for ... in good times, in bad times ...
For more photos of my friends, click on : FRIENDS Aug. 5, 2006
