To Need And Be Needed

Tonight I spent a few hours visiting a friend in the hospital. He's been suffering severe stomach pains for some time now, and it turned out he needed surgery to remove his gall bladder and relieve his pancreas. Nothing life-threatening, but hey-anytime someone decides to stick a knife and other pointy objects around in your stomach, it ain't fun.

The upside to this is that when I arrived (thinking that I would just visit and cheer him up, not realizing that he had gone into surgery since he had failed to mention that little detail), he was shortly to be released from recovery. Of course, he probably won't remember that I was there, but I will never forget that me and five of his closest friends were on hand to make sure that everything went smoothly and that he was well taken care of. Neither will I forget that when he saw us all hovered around his doorway he groaned and said, "I had a dream...and you were there...and you were there...." (Can you see why we're friends? Anyone who can reference "The Wizard of Oz" as they come out of an anesthesia-induced semi-coma is tops on my list!)

That got me thinking. Should something happen to me, I wonder who will be hovering around my stark hospital room waiting for me to be conscious. Will there be flowers? Board games? Movies? It's not that I think my friends don't care. If I thought that, they would not be friends at all. Our lives get so busy, though, and we often just don't make enough time for one another because of this or that. We forget to nurture our everyday cares and woes and victories, and we wait for the huge, unavoidable events. Relationships with friends, family, lovers-they take time and thought and effort. They are not easy. They shouldn't be easy-if they were, they would not be special.

I want to be special. And I want my friends to know they are special to me, not just when they have half their internal organs removed. If I (and you!) can make time for rehearsals, work, hair appointments, oil changes, prime-time tv, and blogging, can't we make time to call and say, "Hi" or "How are you?" or "Just thinking about you"?

After all, friends are way more important than laundry.