9/10/08 Friends are like stars . . .

Good friends are like stars . . . . you don't always see them, but you know they are always there.

no author attribution given

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This was buried in one of those annoying emails that's been forwarded a million times and has too many cute quotes stuck on the bottom of it. But I read them anyway and sure enough, that's where I found this great quote. It also reminds me of this story:

My junior year in high school, a new girl (a sophomore) joined our Girl Scout troop. Her name was Leslie and she moved to Dallas from Philadelphia. She talked funny, dressed differently, and had a haircut like nobody in Texas. (How's that for a welcoming reception for the new girl?) Fortunately, in a good Girl Scout troop, those differences are not an issue. We quickly got to know her and love her. She was a hoot!! (Actually, she still is a hoot. We're still great friends.) Anyway, we had already planned a campout for that fall and since she was now in the troop, she went with us. The second night of the campout, after we had cooked dinner and sung a few songs around the campfire, we were just standing around looking over Lake Texoma at all the stars. It was gorgeous. (It always is. Camp Rocky Point was where I first fell in love with star gazing.) As we're standing there, Leslie starts to talk about how much she misses Philadelphia and her friends back there but that nights like this make it not so bad. She explained that she and her friends had made a pact before she left that whenever they missed each other, they would just look at the stars and feel close because they knew that they were looking at the same stars and somehow you didn't feel so far away if you could both be looking at the same thing at the same time. It was a really cool concept. She said it really worked for her. She never felt quite so far away when she did that.

Not too long after that, John Denver came out with a song that had the exact same concept. The song was Shanghai Breezes and he wrote it when he was in China and was missing his wife back in the states. "And the moon and the stars are the same ones you see, it's the same old sun up on the sky." I always thought he stole it from Leslie. :-)

When my goddaughter Lindsay was moving to New York, she was six. It was hard for her to leave all her friends and family in Dallas. We picked the North Star as "our star" that whenever one of us missed the other we would look at the North Star and know that the other one could see it at the same time and we wouldn't feel so far apart. I know it sounds weird, but it really works.