Old Friends And Alligators

This is Digby Pancake. What is your favorite kind of friend? The friend that you see all of the time?

Or maybe your favorite friend is one that you enjoy from a distance.

Or maybe you love all of your friends like me. Because each of my friends fill a different spot in my heart and in a different way. Each of my friends are important. And all of them are needed.

I wasn’t so sure that I would enjoy coming back to the beach campground here in this Florida place. Because the last time we were here, I was very sick. The last time we were here, Boy Person lost his dad person. And the last time we were here some friends of ours had some pretty bad problems too. And even though it is not the beach campground’s fault, the truth is, the memories that were not so fun from the past were hanging around in the air.

Maybe it is like that with some past friends too. Sometimes life happens. Arguments happen. Things happen not so good. And maybe it is easier to remember bad qualities over the good too.

Especially when one of your friends is an alligator.

Yes, we remember our alligator friend from the campground who lives in the lake. We also remember to give our alligator friend distance. Respect. We talk from afar. The bad qualities of our alligator friend would be it could harm us or worse. But we also know that our alligator friend loves to swim and has a right to swim in her lake. Our friendship is different than maybe our people friends from the campground we remember.

Because as soon as we got here, the first thing Brickle and I wanted to do was visit with our old friends. We remembered their campsite and our past conversations. Out of over a hundred campgrounds, we raced to theirs first, even though it had been more than two years since we saw each other.

Old friends and alligators are special.

Some individuals fill different parts of our life and our heart. But don’t take any one of them for granted.

Just like the alligator here can teach us respect, our campsite friends teach us that with some, we can pick up just where we left off no matter time or distance.