vindaloo

Friend. The term seems very relative to me. Recently I have lost perspective in the true definition of the term friend. What or who is a real friend? If someone is your friend are there any rules the so called friend follows. Are there certain duties one has to do to keep the coveted title. What is it that makes someone a friend.
I always thought of a few people I knew as close friends. People I called up regularly and spoke to in detail about my problems, actually more than often I was on the receiving end and listened to their problems. People I went out regularly with, who I could call any time I needed company. People who knew a great deal about me well not a great deal may be a little.
Well I am not particularly good at making friends. Don’t get me wrong here. I love social gatherings and love to make acquaintances but am not good at keeping long term relationships and with these people. Basically I like to inhabit a particular group of living beings, adapt to their ways and then mix around with them. Then after a period of 2 years or so move to a different environment. I like to meet new people. But in doing so I have kept a few people in the loop for a long time, and it is these people I credit as being friends. But I wonder if they still fit the role as I don’t speak with them that often now, I don’t see them more than once in 2 years. The only method of contact is a card or two on a b’day or an anniversary.
As a kid I’d always hear my parents talk of their friends, the group of people they grew up with, and had known for more than 15 to 20 years. I’m 28 and there is no person that I know that I have kept in contact with for more than 5 or 6 years at most. Guess my nomadic habits have a big part to do with this.
So back to the real question how does one designate some person as a friend. Are my friends the group of people I come in contact with daily. The guys I lived with for 2 years, the group of people I hung out with in college, the guys that I spent 10 years of my life in school, the youth from my parish, my colleagues at work.
How do you guys out there tag your friends ?

I wonder whether I will ever fit the image created by this
Simon and Garfunkel Song.

Old friends, old friends,
Sat on their parkbench like bookends
A newspaper blown through the grass
Falls on the round toes
of the high shoes of the old friends

Old friends, winter companions, the old men
Lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sunset
The sounds of the city sifting through trees
Settles like dust on the shoulders of the old friends

Can you imagine us years from today,
Sharing a parkbench quietly
How terribly strange to be seventy

Old friends, memory brushes the same years,
Silently sharing the same fears