Making the time

Recently I heard someone say that it's important to get together with your friends in a place where none of you lives. I recently met several friends and long-time acquaintances at the Folk Alliance conference in Memphis. We try to go every year, and though we're often working at showcases day and night, we usually find time to go explore the town and try out a couple of good restaurants. This year was no exception.

Although I can't take credit for any of the choices, we had wonderful meals at The Beauty Shop (yes, the very place where Priscilla used to get her hair done. . . it WAS a beauty shop back then), Sawaddi (a yummy Thai restaurant at 2nd and Union), and then breakfast at the Blue Plate. We enjoyed the fried corn and wild rice dishes at Westy's near the convention center, too.

We rode the trolley around the loop downtown, which allowed us to relax and enjoy some of the city we might might not have seen otherwise. A couple of what I suspect were local regulars were on the trolley, and they certainly lended some perspective on the town as well.

All of these things that we do are really about togetherness, exploration (always looking for that next great restaurant or thing to do), stimulation. The funny thing to me is that I typically see these friends once a year, and when we get together, we are the same way together as we were the year before, and we do the same thing, different city. When you're only doing it once a year, this is a good thing. Every city has its own character, if you will, its own flavor, and we adapt accordingly. It's really about being together, catching up, having fun, and staying up way too late.

Thinking about these friendships brings me to my next thought. I sense that this next year for me is going to be more about friends. A couple of years ago a newer friend told me that she'd changed her life so that she could focus on the most important element in her life: the people who mean the most to her. Shortly thereafter, I realized how little I'd done to nurture a number of relationships in my own life that I value.

I'm trying to clear the fog from my brain and many of the gazillion possessions from my home so I can focus on the people and things that are most important to me. I feel weighed down by my belongings and distracted from my relationships. In addition to just wanting to make more and better efforts to see friends who live in other places and to stay in touch with them from afar, I also want to spend more time on things I enjoy or on which I want to improve.

Photography's a perfect example. At times in my life, I've been a photo hound. I used to love taking photos with my old manual 35mm Nikon to document every step of my life and others', and I thrived on printing my own black and white photos. I've gotten lazy with my little digital number, opting mostly for the automatic option even when I could use the basic manual settings. It's not a great camera, but it does give me some options.

For me right now, being lazy about the photography is better than not taking photos at all. But I'd like to get to a point where I can once again focus on photography as a hobby rather than as an afterthought. . . and preferably, I'll be practicing this hobby with friends in faraway places.