Friendship is a fragile bargain...

It is wonderful to talk to old acquaintances that know what you know and have shared experiences with you in the past. As people mature, they become more expansive mentally because they've accumulated enormous experience. By peering together into the past, you and they can benefit from the perspective that time brings. This surely must be the most exciting, interesting, and fulfilling part of our lives. Few people understand that friendship is a fragile bargain, rescindable at any time by the other party, and live their lives blithely unaware of the mutual vulnerability and danger of losing old friends. I meet so many new people nowadays who for me seem to have neither a past nor a future, although they obviously have... they present themselves to me as an ontological given - without a past I mean...as a phenomenlogical fact of life. I must appear to them in a similar light - for them I have no past and have always been an old woman. Do you know what I mean? Conversation has to have SOME root in the past, or else, you've got to explain every remark you make, and it is very arduous to have to do that - and tends to get a bit boring.