Friendships have to start somewhere, true. This discussion led me to think back to how I met my three closest still-living friends (being no longer young, I've outlived most of the friends of my youth, but these three are still around).
. About forty-five years ago, one of my numerous cousins turned up on my doorstep to ask me to look after a young woman who had been travelling, was completely lost, and needed a place to stay. I provided this, and in the process she noticed and remarked on, yes, my music collection. We got to talking music, and long after she had found work and a permanent place to live we maintained the friendship. I'm godmother to her now adult children, and we're still fast friends and visit when we can, though now I live in South Australia and she lives in Cape York.
. A bit after that, this young man turned up in a martial-arts class I was teaching. Nice quiet boy, very mannerly, and somehow vaguely familiar-looking, not quite like someone I knew, more that he reminded me of someone. So after a few months of classes he turns up one day and completely out of the blue he asks me if I knew person X and person Y. I explained that yes, I had known them, one was a greataunt of mine, the other a second cousin, but both were now dead. At which point he explained to me that because I looked familiar to him too, he had gone back through his family records, found photos of the two who looked most like me, tracked down their family trees and realised that we were related - second cousins once removed, he being from a branch of my family that I had thought extinct. We're still good mates as well as rediscovered relatives.
Finally, around the same time, my present husband and I were introduced as a practical joke. We havent stopped talking since, and he was a good friend for many years before we became a couple. Still is, after thirty-some years.
