Get together: Build social bonds like friendship and kinship

You could ride a hundred miles and not see it

Yet the horse feels it when you say ‘git’,

Overflowing water like emotive expressions from a lover’s lip

Harangues hapless dancers swimming beside the ship

Sometimes field the ball without the mitt

Sparkling intimacies:

Friendship like kinship stumble over the threshold of your house

Going back home

Keeping friendship at bay while parrying kinship (no more sweets till evening) is a bit like throwing the dog’s tail when the dog is attached to it. Yet everyone indulges in this exercise in futility even when the outcome is not certain. It is very much like the rain you know will come when you have left your umbrella at home.

Too often we see friendship like a stray dog wandering without any real belonging or kinship. Pride and routines have no time to accommodate such frivolities or listen to indiscriminate ranting of untethered events. Time has too much to listen to, too much to achieve and does not need or heed distractions. Working on building a relationship that lasts takes time and effort.

Every house needs people – I once went to a zoo and never found any animals there. I had to be content looking at the zookeeper. But I guess, in time a zoo gets filled with animals just as a house gets filled with people. Finding the zookeeper in our house is tough. He sometimes crawls under the bed, either in curiosity or due to domestic pressure and it is tough to get answers out of him. He learns tricks from our house cat.

In my house we have an open door policy with regard to keeping a low profile. Often we have to go searching for my kid brother who crawled out and made his way across the garden. it is easy for him to maintain that low profile until he is far away. Luckily, he cannot climb trees and so we do not have to search in the tree tops. This kinship with crawling does not have any pattern. It mostly depends on the layout of the land.

He strikes up friendship with the neighbors dogs but is slightly allergic to cats. They invariably get into a fight and we have to separate them. Luckily there are not many cats in this neighborhood.

We maintain a groovy garden with an immaculate lawn. It has metal borders so that grass cannot grow out of bounds and creep into flower beds. Somehow, grass has a kinship with flower beds and before you know it you have a grassy bush with a few flowers peeping though. That is why we use borders. These prevent kinship from spreading too far. This lovely lawn sometimes makes me sing out loud. It is one of the few things that make life worthwhile.

All our friends like to sit out on the lawn and share a cup of coffee or tea. It helps our friendship grow and is useful when you want to suddenly borrow a tenner to pay up the paper bill. What are friends for? Even cat joins in at these friendly get-together on the garden lawn.

On some days, we begin our day with this morning tea or morning coffee ritual. It helps strengthen our friendship and serves as a good place to exchange tenners or twenties. Invariably, those who have taken the tens and twenties do not show up for the next meeting.

Thus we see how friendship is built on trust, meetings on garden lawn (sometimes two sometime more) and coffee. Dogs and cats will follows suit of course.

That reminds me, do you have a tenner on you?