Garden of Friendship

Very often I discover myself considering and sharing concerning the value of friendship; what I often refer to as "Sacred Trusts", in fact in my phone contacts I have my friends listed under this heading to remind me that it is God who have brought the individuals that I call friends into my life.

Ironically, as much as I value friendship, I am not always, by nature the most efficient when it comes to nurturing them. Like the beautiful flowers in a gardener's flower bed, friendships are given to us in seed form, but He allows us the tasks of planting them, watering them and the hard tasks of weeding them.

As most writers, I embrace the competing value of solitude; I'm a homebody and I like to sit alone and think. Such a value is not consistent with tending the garden of friendship. I struggle often and mostly fail with visiting even my closest family; as much as I love them and as certainly as I enjoy visiting with them, ashamedly, I could go for months or years and never visit. While God has apparently given me a great propensity to love, He has also bestowed a limited reserve of creative energy to do any two things simultaneously. At the end of the work day my natural instinct is to crawl into the solitude of home and vanish to the world; such a nature is not conducive to relationship building. As an individual who is a "People-Person" and as one who appreciates all the positive and healing virtues of living community, ironically given the option on most days, I seek solitude. Relaxing on the couch or writing at a desk does little to see the the entrusted garden of God is being well-tended.

Yesterday morning God allowed me to blow the dust off the of my forsaken plants. I think I tired the twine around one of my oldest specimens to give it a fresh start. I used to love to grow gladiolas. Glads are beautiful and showy, pretty easy to plant, easy to weed around and for the most part they are pest resistant, however, because they grow so quickly and to such good height, there tall lanky stems require the additional exterior support of post and twine. With such support there is nothing quit as captivating as a full garden of glads. Let alone the otherwise healthy and potentially beautiful bed becomes an eyesore of twisted and broken stems, blooms buried in dirt and green.

The eldest of our friendships are like those glads; the roots go deep, but the need a little extra attention to keep them at their best. So yesterday, I was blessed with the warmth and sunshine of God to tend to such a relationship.

Dave Smalley has been a friend of mine since before "The Summer of 42", before "Mash" and long before Paul Harvey came to our radios to tell us "The Rest of The Story". I was 15 and biting at the heels of Lennon and McCartney to steal their limelight. I was full of a love of writing and playing music and not much else. I often pulled around me mates who had the same hunger and vision and surprisingly, like the four lads from Liverpool, the resulting sounds were far better collaboratively than they were apart; Joe and Bob Halaz, Jack Deater, J.D. Mace, my twin (when his conscience would allow), Jim Thacker, Mark Justice, Dave and Kennt River and later their sister; Linda, Don Tipton, Frank Lemaster,  Denise Wright, Barb Olson, Tim (whose last name escapes me) and Dave Smalley, as well as his brother Bob.

Not all those musicians and singers formed one band, but most all of us have played together in one combination or another within a period of six years. Whatever variation, the result for a local garden was amazing. I hear "professional bands" and local bands of today and I am amazed at the quality of the planting that God allowed me to be a part of. Two other neglected plants were also pretty good, the first was a black bass guitar player that I think Jack brought into the mix; I forget his name, but he played a mean slap bass and then there was a drummer who auditioned for us one week, we turned him down and he signed with country singer Tom T. Hall in Nashville the very next week. He was good, but was just not a good "fit" for us; he was a like a single Hollyhock in a planting of Gladiolus.

But Dave; Dave was my brother, not by birth, but by choice. We developed a communication that allowed us to move on stage as one. We could "know" what the other was going to do even before we knew ourselves. He and I used to echo one another voice to guitar long before I had ever heard anyone do it. I would scat a melody line and he would echo it back to me note for note on guitar and then he would solo a melody to me and I would sing it back to him. I'm certain that our audiences thought those long and hopefully entertaining bits were well rehearsed, but they never were, they were always impromptu.

The thing about a real relationship is that it perfects the participants within. I sang notes with Dave that I have never hit again and I am certain that he feels that I helped him develop as an artist as well. That's the value of friendship isn't it? God has a garden in mind; blossoms that He desires to see in all the radiant glory, so He hands us the seed. He says, "tend it well!" Gives us the sunshine and the rain and sits back to see if we make of it all that He intended.

As I have already said, yesterday I dug-up the bulb of  a treasured planting, Dave and I blew of the dust, put it back in the grown and are waiting to see the beauty that God has planned.

Don't forsake your gardens of friendship.