would you drive for hours to come to my party?

My husband had a wonderful idea to have a big family/friends outdoor party this summer.  We haven't really done that in our years of marriage, so it sounded like a great idea.  All I had to do was come up with a list of my friends to invite and he'd take care of the rest.  Wow!  Even better!

So yesterday I sat down and compiled my list.  Not counting the small family that I have, the list consisted of 10 couples.  That was it.  And to make matters even more depressing, more than half of those people live over an hour away.  Some much further than that.  I would probably have 4-5 of them show up.  All of the sudden I found myself thinking the same thing that I heard my middle-school-aged son ask me a couple of months ago:  Why don't I have many friends?

I've always told my son, and I do believe this, that it's not the quantity of friends you have, it's the quality.  That I've always had two or three close friends and I can get along with just about anyone, but those close friends mean the world to me.  I guess when you grow up and life gets busy and people move away, you wish you had a little more of the quantity.

Having close friends, near or far, is that they'll be there in good times or in bad, no matter how long it's been since you've seen each other.. They're the kinds of people who would give you a place to stay when you finally went off your rocker and had to run from the law...while convincing you to turn yourself in if it was the right thing to do.  If you were in the hospital after some sort of serious car accident, they'd make the trip to visit you.  Well, maybe.  Maybe they'd send a card.  Eh.

My husband is the kind of guy who has friends left and right.  He could easily fill up a party with 50 friends:  People he hangs out with at bars, sees at karaoke, worked with once upon a time.  I just don't think any of them are the type that he would call up when he needed to vent to someone or really needed a friend to turn to.  I don't see any of them as being "close".  Maybe I'm wrong.

I found myself getting jealous of the friends who had moved away.  That because I'm still here in the same small town I grew up in and have been working in the same place for almost ten years, I haven't had the exposure or opportunity to make many new friends.  You move to a different town and you meet a slew of new people.  Some aquaintances, some become close.  They are added to your list of friends and the more you move, the more the number increases.  Those new friends become the people who get invited to parties, impromptu dinners, get phone calls to help out with things, see their lives day to day...while those of us left in the old hometown are just infrequent email recipients and facebook status updates and "likes".

I even told my husband at one point that I want to move so I can meet more people.  He told me we just have to try to go out more.  This is a small town.  We have nowhere to go but small-town bars.  I highly doubt we're going to find new friends sitting in one of those.  Well, maybe he might...

Last night I sadly gave him my short guest list.  He studied it for a couple of minutes and realized the percentage of people who would show up.  Then he thought about who he was inviting and wondered how many of them, even if they lived close, would make the effort to come.  We realized that it would probably end up being mostly family and just a couple of friends and wondered if we should even bother.

So that's where we stand.  Do we bother making all the preparations, planning, spending money on the park shelter and have a small number of people who barely know each other and really have nothing in common show up, or do we go ahead with it and hope that our friends surprise us and show up?



P.S.   I should give a big shout-out to my friends who still live in my hometown.  We don't see each other nearly enough, but I'm so thankful you're still in my life.  :)