SAUCIER — ‘I call you friends’

We gathered on the shores of Lake Norman.

We were physicists, lawyers, engineers, business owners, and assorted others like me.

What we all had in common was time.

Long before we were retirees — even before we started families or placed a tentative foot in the real world — we were friends chasing the dreams of 18- and 19-year-olds in the late ’60s.

We wanted the horrors of war to end, the scourge of racism to disappear, and the injustice of poverty to be vanquished.

We also wanted pizza and beer on Wednesday nights, parties on the weekend, trips on breaks, and fun at the dunes on a warm spring day.

We were kids who bonded in a small campus dorm. We studied and ate together, played basketball together, and spent long late-night hours fixing the world’s problems with the blunt tools of youthful idealism.

Fast-forward 56 years. Basketball has been replaced by pickleball, and late-night hours are in the p.m., not the a.m., but we are still together.

After graduation, our paths diverged, but we kept in touch with occasional visits, Christmas cards, and school reunions.

In recent years, we’ve had Zoom gatherings every other week — complete with agendas that include topical discussions, guest presentations, and the inevitable sports commentary.

Now, we also physically meet every couple of years. At Lake Norman, there were 14 of us and nine of our lovely brides.

We have men who cook like Michelin chefs and women who bake like French boulangères. Every meal was a feast, a communion of delectable bounty and delicious conversation.

Those conversations began with the sunrise over the eastern shore and lingered with the dying embers in the evening firepit, rambling from quantum entanglement to the feminine divine.

In smaller groups, we’d tell our stories, exchanging life’s passports with all their stamps of loves great and lost, of life-threatening cancers and heart attacks, of the fears for our children and theirs.

It was punctuated with a lot of laughter and some necessary tears. It all revealed the many faces of God in our lives.

With pictures taken and cars packed, there were long uninhibited hugs.

At this age, one of us may be a memory the next time we meet. We want each other to know now how much they are cherished and what a grace their life has been.

Thomas Aquinas was right: “There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.”