It's called busy work, though I've never completely understood why. Busy work supposedly let's our hands do the work, disengaged from our brains. We're just busy. Not engaged. Or, at least that's how I understand it. And, so, it was busy work that I was doing at the kitchen sink, scrubbing that last pot, trying to be delicate and aggressive at the same time ... getting that perfect balance of pressure to remove the baked on goop while preserving that valuable finish on the surface of the pan, when she came to mind. That friend of mine with the story that still makes me chuckle years later.

Her story is that, while a teenager at home alone, she literally scrubbed the teflon finish right off her mom's electric skillet. It was the dickens of a job, she'd say. The elbow grease and commitment to get the last of that "mess" off that skillet was Herculean. But, by golly, she'd done it.

That story engaged my disengaged brain and set me on a course of thinking that when I remember friends, I remember stories. I can identify friends by a single story that makes me laugh, builds me up in encouragement, or causes me to see life differently than before.

I remember my first Tennessee friend. From my new front yard after moving across the country, literally, from Oregon when I was five years old and scared for friends, I looked across the road  and saw her leaning up against the corner of her house. She was six years old and wearing a dress up bridal gown and veil. And she was looking back across the road at me, who might have even been wearing a glittery dress up prom dress. My heart leapt in assurance of friendship!

There's the friend who flew to Houston, Texas to help move me and my Suburban back home to Alabama after a summer at MD Anderson Cancer Center there. In response to my attempts to reimburse her for the flight she'd made to Houston, she'd said, "Well, you can pay me back if you want. But, be warned, I'm going to change that money into quarters and dump it on your front lawn." Enough said.

I have laughed so hard with another friend that we've thought we really might have "busted" the proverbial gut and might have to make a run to the emergency room. I also think of her every time I peel cucumbers or carrots, picturing her graceful stance at the cutting board, carefully and deliberately preparing salad to share with visitors. But in that gracious and abundant offering of salad there was a dash of hilarity when once it was asked if Godzilla would be joining us for salad.

There's the group of four, who making our way through the dim, vast tunnels of Gibraltar came to be known as The Unit. We've been stranded on a train in France after national news making catastrophic train failure. We've found ourselves not speaking to each other when, during an episode in our relationship lovingly referred to as "The Madrid Moment," we'd found ourselves on the wrong train in Madrid on the infamous seventh day of travel together ... the day all travelers grow to hate their travel companions no matter how much love is there. Y'all, we know who we are.

When I say "we gave our dog away at a Strawberry Plains gas station," there are new friends who know the rest of the miraculous story. Elton John sing-alongs around the piano in the 1970"s? You definitely know who you are! And, a forever sister despite divorce binds us as Heart Sisters with a saga all our own.

I revisit these stories as often as I revisit these friends. These stories, all our stories, are the threads that stitch us together. We've got to tell our stories, then retell them again to savor and set in a firm foundation of friendship.  Because of that revisiting, I can say with accuracy that these friends know who they are to me. If they don't, I've got some visiting to do. You and yours, too.

At the bottom of my résumé, under Other Interests, I have included the following:

• Creating programs and opportunities for helping others reach their full potential and which improve the human condition
• Giving comfort to those in need
• Servant leadership
• Traveling (global, local, all types for cultural experiences)
• Reading books of purpose and value

Reviewing that résumé now, a few years after having composed it, I can see clearly that these are ideals rather than interests, but the list still makes perfect sense to me. These ideals matter in the definition of who I am. But why does that particular list matter so much to me that I am intent on keeping it in my résumé, even though I now can see that it is in a language perhaps not always understood by potential employers? In trying to clearly convey who I am, am I unintentionally esoteric? 

To be clear, then, what I'm trying to say is that I want to dedicate myself to work that matters in some way for not just myself, but for others. What I am trying to say is that I want the travel I experience to open me up to a better understanding of the greater world in both its glories and the needs of its people. What I am trying to say is that I am inspired by non-fiction books, which speak to the real life experiences of others from which I am inspired either to do likewise or to carry on. 

When feeling overwhelmed, for example, I'm apt to say, "If Dear Mad'm can do it, so can I!" Check her out. Stella Walthall Patterson is her name, and "Dear Mad'm" is her story. It's definitely one of the 1940's, peppered here and there with occasional quirky political incorrectness, but one from which we can still gain. And, that's the point. To gain intrinsically, to grow in our ideals, in our virtues and values, and our ethical treatment of all of life. Live life experiences from which we can gain. Read books from which we can gain. All this can shape us to be more the kind of person we want to be. 

I have a top seven, so far, of books that have done that for me. Stories to which I go back for regular helpings.  "Dear Mad'm" is in that top seven for its story of an 80 year old woman striking out to live alone with her "young legs" in an isolated cabin in the mountains.  So is "Angela's Ashes," from which I learned I'd rather be the oppressed than the oppressor. "Isaac's Storm," taught me that whatever storm or natural disaster we encounter in our own lives has already, most likely, happened in the life of someone else. We must be sensitive to and aware that Isaac stood on the coast of Galveston in early September 1900, feeling inadequate in his job as meteorologist, suspecting that something powerful was approaching that he couldn't even begin to name, nor from which he could save the people he loved. 

"Christy" was only 19 years old when she boarded a train, alone, in Buncombe County North Carolina and entered into a place of need in Appalachia, not far from where I grew up in East Tennessee, and left the mark of education and opportunity for the people of that area.  "The Long Walk to Freedom" never fails to remind me that it is possible to own a life, as Nelson Mandela did, that peacefully yet dramatically changes the course of a nation caught up in violent turmoil. And I pray anytime I want to complain about the cold or uncomfortable aspects of life, that Corrie Ten Boom will always be close by in remembrance. "The Hiding Place" calls us all to do better, and more, than complain. 

Rounding out the life shaper list, and truly, in my opinion and belief, the Greatest Story Ever Told, is the Bible. These Words hold the story of God's plan for Creation, and that includes us. It is that plan upon which I rest and work and get on with that which is pure, that which is lovely, that which is admirable. Think on those things.