When I was a kid growing up,
long distance meant one thing: special, and often expensive, phone calls.
A long distance phone call was reserved for important occasions.
For regular communications there were airmail letters (if you had a lot to say) and postcards, if you wanted to share a few glib words and make people envy your vacation choice.
Things sure have changed.
And they continue to change. The internet has changed the way we live, sometimes in ways that are dramatic.
Take my life, for instance.
I blog.
Why? The source can be traced to my desire to commute to work on a scooter instead of driving a car or riding a train. It's a choice that few people make in North America. Because it's my nature, I turned to Google for information.
What I found was the Modern Vespa Forum, and a number of moto and scooter bloggers.
What a treasure trove those finds have turned out to be. I found all the information I thought I needed, and a whole bunch more that I didn't know I needed.
And that's what led to starting this blog.
I was raised to believe that giving is more important than receiving. Having received so much from people whose blogs I had read, I knew I had to start a blog of my own to return the favour.
I was not long after that I found the unexpected. I found friends. Good friends. What kind of good friends?
Well that depends how you define "friend". I suppose we all have slightly different definitions.
Some of us may make friends easily, and may have many friends.
Like many of us who have demanding careers, and have married and raised a family, personal time has been the exception rather than the rule for me.
I've never had many friends.
Long distance took a toll on the friendships I did have. Very close friends moved hundreds of miles away. It was difficult to maintain those friendships. In many cases, long distance eventually dissipated the intimacy and shared experience that make friendships work.
Lately a reversal is taking hold.
The more I ride, the more I blog and post on the forum.
My words are seeds, and I have literally sown thousands of them. It often turns out that they are seeds of friendship.
Long distance friendships have sprouted. No one is more blown away by my new friendships than yours truly.
Let's get back to what it means to have a friend. I define friendship as someone who devotes precious time to you at the expense of spending time with someone else.
By that definition I have earned a number of friends.
I define a good, or close friend, as someone who will go out of their way for you. By that definition, I count four new good friends.
The interesting thing is that they are all long distance friendships.
I don't want to embarrass them because friends don't embarrass friends, so I won't go into detail about who they are, where they live, their acts of kindness, or how they have gone out of their way to spend time with me, or do special favours for me.
These are people I would invite to share my home in a heartbeat, lend my Vespa to, share a meal with, go out of my way to help, or travel with. Truly good, close friends.
This experience has helped me to understand the power of the internet and of shared interests to obliterate the barrier of long distance.
It's yet another way that riding a scooter has enriched my life more than I could have imagined when I set out on this adventure.
Life on two wheels rocks!