A Toast To Friendship

I don’t have a huge list of friends, especially female ones.  I’m an introvert and happy with that, I enjoy my own company.  I don’t like the drama that many female (and some male!) relationships can create.  I don’t believe in rushing to the defense of someone no matter what, I believe in holding to my values and in being honest when I think someone is out of line, and this is not what leads you down the road of popularity.  I’ve my whole life been more “one of the guys” than the sorority sister type.

This is not to say I have no friends of course, there are some I hold very dear, and each holds a special place in my heart.  There are the few moms I’ve met through baseball over the years who I get together with probably not often enough, we all are busy, and, well, I need to be texting them for the next get together, it’s been a few months.  There is a friend who I see rarely, but who was there for the birth of my child and whom I know will always be there for anything I need. There are male friends I’ve met through the cigar lounge my husband went to long before I married him, who text me helpful or funny or silly things during the week and who I really enjoy hanging out with on weekends when we all go to the cigar lounge.  There are friends from work with whom I instant message during big meetings (we work from home) to discuss the things that way-way-up-there-disconnected-from-our-day-to-day-jobs people tell us about our jobs, who also get together periodically to connect in other areas of our lives. There are friends I know from high school and college, and thanks to the internet we've reconnected and see each other occasionally. There are friends I know from online forums, including a parenting page I used to help admin.  There are friends from the neighborhood or mom's of my son's friends and various other random places.

And then there is a friend who, well, just really, really gets me.  She is close to my mom’s age, she lived across the country until this year, and I actually met her on a Disney message board!  One day, over 10 years ago, she posted asking about something she had heard of, a “Monorail Drink-a-thon,”, in which you take the monorail and get a drink at the 3 resort stops.  She never expected her post to turn into a phenomenon, and I never expected a post to turn into a long friendship, but, well, that is what happened.  The post became a thread where we formed friendships and actually all met at Disney one day to do the Monorail Drink-a-thon.  We hit it off when we met, and the rest is history.  We’ve met up at Disney at least a dozen times since, even sharing a room sometimes at the resort, she came down from Chicago to attend my wedding 5 years ago, and she now lives in a home she bought in Orlando.  She holds one of the biggest places in my heart, and I just wanted to acknowledge that.

That’s why they have wine.  And she is always there to toast with me, even if she sticks with Bud Light!