Had lunch today with a friend I hold very dear, who has been through enormous struggles of late – and I came away from this lunch feeling raw. When her going got rough, I kept trying to avert her attention to what is good without acknowledging the HUGE elephant in the room crushing her chest. I put on my typical pollyanna face and she behaved in her typical stoic manner. Since we both have jobs that don’t lend themselves to lunches, we’ve been pushing our getting together out further and further until we finally found time for each other. Armed with Blackberries we agreed not to look at them, but on the way to lunch, I glued my fingers together in a run-in with a tube of superglue and she answered the phone when her new client called and lo and behold, when lunch started, we were checking emails and responding to work. And then we began to peel back layers of catching up – my turn: hello, I’m head over heels in love with a woman – her turn: I am still falling apart [tears] – back and forth we went until our leisurely hour and a half lunch was more like a 40-minute EPIC miniseries of major changes and occurrences and realizations in both of our lives – then suddenly I had to end our lunch to get on a call I had missed earlier due to webbed digits, and so in the 11th hour of our moment together, she said, I’m just going to tell you that I’ve been building up resentment towards you because of …… and so in 15 minutes, we went through that she had asked for and didn’t get what she needed from me, and I apologized for trying to spin any sort of positive out of her utterly devastating issue, and in the crescendo of paying the bill, minutes ticking away to get on my work call, her tears, my tears, we walked outside the restaurant and holding her in my arms, still crying, she broke through the thickness in the air by saying, “Those poor people sitting next to us!” True friends come to us so infrequently and deserve to be cherished – thankfully she values me enough as a friend to tell me where I had failed her – she saved our friendship today by giving me another chance to be her friend.