Friends and Fellow Travelers

A friend, an olde friend sent me this image and said that it reminded him of me. Somewhere in storage or in another friend's home there is a white Balinese mask very similar to that image. We were in the workshop/gallery of a gifted mask-maker in Ubud, Bali. Mask were being tried on, laughter was awash but respect was being shown to a true craftsman. I put on the white mask in a back hallway and leaned out into the main room just my head emmasked. For a moment there was complete silence and then everyone came towards me, I had evidently found my one true mask. I need to get it out again, wonder where it rests?

But today's post is not about me or images of me. Today's post is about friends and how I speak of friends in this blog. Long time readers know that I tend to begin a tale with -- "a friend told me the other day" or I write about friends as examples of all things good and not so. Friends who make me happy and those that make me sad or baffle me are blog fodder. There are even a couple of very close friends I never write about either because they are just too private and I don't want to intrude or I have ever so lightly referenced them in the past and received less than warm returns via critique.

Recently a post got three responses that basically said -- "Did you mean me?"

So new rule. In the future when I use the term friend I will send said friend an email disclosing their appearance, no matter how veiled, in this here blog. No email, it ain't you.

Now I must go, there are some towering grey clouds hanging low over San Francisco Bay. The sun has been transformed into a viewable disk as it sinks into the greyness. I am going to sit and watch as light and dark struggle. Which I wonder shall prevail?