I am holding in my hand a suede Filofax I’d got from a whirlwind trip to Europe one summer a while back. I remember entering a leather goods shop in Florence, Italy, popular with tourists for its leatherbound goods. The minute I saw this Filo, I’d fallen in love with the texture of the rich burgudy suede, which alternated with mock croc leather on the spine and the leather snap clasp. Though almost 20 years old, the Filofax retains its elegance and exudes it even today, in middle August of the first decade of the 21st century.
I’m crazy, right, to even want to toss it? But right now, there’s so much stuff in my living spaces to sort and keep and throw that anything I haven’t touched in 6 months goes into a trash bag.
So I flip through the old Filofax pages spanning the year 2000, take out my kids’ photos, and find, tucked in a pocket at the back cover this bit of writing:
It never ceased to amaze her that throughout their tumultous adolescence and angst-ridden twenties, when the tides of life was swirling around and bringing endless change to their lives, somehow they had remained unchanged to each other.
Time seemed to have pleasantly stagnated somewhere around the early years of their friendship, so that whether they were working professionals in the middle of lunch hour on Shenton Way or mourning a relationship over coffee at the club, their meetings had an integrity about it; it was almost like watching an old movie together.
That was written in my mid-twenties as part of a short story about friendship. It was a paean to that kind of friendship forged in the green fuse of the flower of youth. If this kind of friendship survives the parting of ways, the paper chase, the vagaries of life in the working world, then it is a blessing, a gift from the Giver of all good things, a glimpse into the things of the heavenly realm, where souls touch and rejoice.
More later. Gotta get packing.
Tell me what you think.