Welcome to Sunday Morn Musings.  This is my weekly free fall – writing about whatever it is that occupies the mind on a Sunday Morn.  The idea of a “no topic” posting is the stepchild to a blog I used to write:  Four O’Clock Thursdays which is still up there if you want to check it out – more likely, I will repurpose and republish some of those posts here over time.  On Sunday Morn Musings the topic may be about blogging but just as likely it may not.

The longer we live the more friends we have, or do we?

Is it just that the longer we live, the more people we know?  And if we know more people then do we have more friends?  But what about “Old Friends?”

Some of the people we know are business associates, friends of parents and friends of  relatives.   Some of the people we know belong to the same association, the same fitness club, the same mastermind group.  Some are friends, and a very few are old friends.

An”Old Friend” has little to do with age although it has its roots in that association.  An old friend is a special unspoken honor conferred by two people, two families, or more upon each other and when one is in need the other will go to the ends of the earth to meet that need.  It is an old Chinese custom not easily conferred, but once done carries on from generation to generation.  Bluntly put, it is as much about friendship as we know it as it is about powerful connections, it is after all who you know that makes the difference.

How did I get on this topic?  This week I had lunch with an “old friend.”  Yes we have known each other long enough to be old friends in the traditional sense, but we are also “old friends” in the Chinese definition as well and it has nothing to do with the fact that he is Chinese.  In one of James Clavell’s books, Noble House,  Ian Straun Dunross is saved from financial ruin by an improbable outwardly seeming adversary, a high ranking aparatchik in the Chinese  communist regime.  Ian turns to him as a last resort and is greeted as an “old friend.”

The idea behind old friend is that old friends are the best kind.  You first met as youngsters, fashioned a friendship and over the growing years laughed, cried, fought with and for each other.  Your word was gold.  The more the years, the stronger the tie.  Not too many develop such a friendship.  New friendships formed may be strong but they do not have the little things hardwired into their very sinews, little things like unconditional loyalty and trust.  Lucky are those  to have a handful, if that many, of such old friends; most never do.

Over sable fish and gnocchi we did some catch up – family and business.   On parting, Nelson gave me the greatest compliment of all, he said “Valentina, I am honored to have such an old friend as you.”  I wished that I had said it first.  It is true.

I knoodled over old friend as I drove home.  I even took a long route, via my favorite ocean shore drive, Point Grey and then over past UBC  to ponder on it.   My thoughts turned to  the Monday night previous.

Regular readers here know that Monday night is my weekly Internet Marketing Mastermind meeting.  Matt was speaking.    Matt is the expert on social media and he was talking about Facebook with a membership of some 250 milliion and growing.  What he was saying was that we should not accept every invite to be a “friend” only from those that we know, put the others into a holding pattern, eventually you can always move them from one group to the other but only if you want, only when you get to know them should you allow them entry to your small but solid and trusted circle of “friends.”  It’s not in the numbers, but in the quality of your relationship which may blossom into a friendship – or not.

Facebook, he told us, has 11 year olds as members.  They develop connections, then relationships and some of those may blossom into friendships.  Hmm, I thought, so Old Friend may have a different complexion in meaning to them than it does to the traditional Chinese.  Matt thinks that this group will be the first highly connected group of people, and therefore will wield a great deal of power.  In ten year’s time they will have grown their network to include all corners of the world, all manners of people, rising stars connected to captains of industry, influencers, decision makers, dissidents, champions, and the list goes on.  Six degrees of separation will be more like one, or two at most.

The idea is mind boggling.  I know people who know people by which I mean, that with the right introduction you will be given special treatment be that at a restaurant, a clothing store, a realtor or perhaps a good accountant.  I am not such a person.  Even though I was raised in the orient and indeed my father always stressed connections – it’s not just an Asian thing, but European as well – I came to Canada in my early twenties.  Here you did not need to have a good connection to get the right plumber, a doctor, or a fish monger who would help you pick out the best fish.  I learned to shop at the supermarkets where most everything was packaged,  paid full price  unless it was officially on sale.  Bargaining was not done and jobs were obtained on your own merit.  Everything was above board, people lined up in orderly fashion whether to get on the bus or wait their turn to pay at the checkout counter.  What you saw was what you got – or so I was led to believe and naive enough to accept.

Things have changed since I first came here.  Even if shopping at a high end jeweler  “is this the best you can do” is a standard question, better yet if you know the owner of the store or have someone give you a personal introduction, someone who may have old friend status with the owner.

Today’s young people are far more savvy and consciously go out to develop a wider circle of friends – several circles in fact.  I venture that as the years pile on one after the other, the interconnected numbers will be staggering, like a chain link fence.  My hunch is that some of the links will have a familiar ring, that of an “old friend” – at least I hope so.

Welcome to Sunday Morn Musings.  This is my weekly free fall – writing about whatever it is that occupies the mind on a Sunday Morn.  The idea of a “no topic” posting is the stepchild to a blog I used to write:  Four O’Clock Thursdays which is still up there if you want to check it out – more likely, I will repurpose and republish some of those posts here over time.  On Sunday Morn Musings the topic may be about blogging but just as likely it may not.

When shopping for fresh produce I stay away from the pure red, blemish free, perfectly round, still attached to its vine, tomato.  Instead, I carefully pick through the adjacent bin, the one with the imperfect tomatoes looking for perfect tomatoes.  I know.  That is a contradiction.   I do this even in the winter when the imperfect ones come from far away lands and have the taste and feel of cardboard rather than fruit.  I rationalize this seemingly irrational preference by telling myself that at least they, the imperfects, have grown in soil.

I go for the organics once again lulling my brain into thinking that that is the better choice.   In actual fact, I really don’t know.  I try to be informed and in doing so, I know that not everything that I am fed as  fact is actually so.

So what’s wrong with the perfect tomatoes?  Probably nothing.  Certainly agricultural scientists will tell you that not only are the perfects a beauty to behold but that they are every bit as nutritional as the imperfects, perhaps even more so.  You see, they are grown in big glass houses.  Their little feet know nothing of the feel of having been germinated in rich black soil, of what it is like to grow up in the open fields, feeding on minerals and other nutrients of that soil, to move in the gentle soughing of a breeze, drink in the water as it falls from the sky, to bask in the sun’s rays.

The perfects, as I said, grow in glass houses. They call them greenhouses, not to be confused with hothouses in which the produce grown is merely given a leg up to the little seedlings to survive in an otherwise cold climate where summers come late and leave early.  No these are industrial parks housing acres upon acres of hydroponic farming.  These are not farms.  They are factories.

As the word hydro suggests this is water gardening taken to scientific horticultural heights that produces  designer fruits and vegetables.  Tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, bell peppers (capsicum to those in the southern hemisphere) and now even kiwis and who knows whatever else are grown in perlite, which is a natural occurring glass substance that has a relatively high water content.

What goes against my grain is that these little darlings that find their way to the grocers and then our tables are grown in a cocktail thrown together by a chemist – an adroit chemist no less who carefully measures out the right mix and dose of petrochemicals so that a tomato grows up to look like one, that it does not mistakenly get crossed with a cucumber or a bell pepper.  The system is rigged to drip the right amount at the right intervals to ensure that our food on the vine is getting all the nutrition it needs to look  and taste like it’s hardier cousin that has grown out in the open.

Horticulturalists will tell you that these fruits and veggies are just as nutritional as the ground grown variety, perhaps even more so and that they taste even better.

That, I suppose depends on your taste buds.

When you’ve grown up on fresh produce that was available only in season, when it was picked only when it was ripe and ready for the local market as I have, then your taste buds are otherwise informed.   I eagerly look forward to the opening of the local farmers markets.  Not all are created equal – some still bring in fruits and veggies that the local super markets carry from other countries, don’t understand that.

No, I like the weekend kind of farmers markets, where the farmer and his family man the stalls and you can just see them brimming with pride at the tasty food that they have grown on their farms.  Often they have varieties of produce that is just not available elsewhere and sometimes, some even sell pickled produce or jams that they made themselves. Yum!  Everything costs more but I`ll gladly forgo a latte or two to buy farmer direct.

If you have occasion to drive in rural farming areas as I do, you will come across farmers roadside stands.  I always stop and buy.  They only sell that which they grow.  My favorites are the corn stands.  I think that the tastiest corn is that which is picked minutes before the ears are shucked and put into the boiling pot, but the next best is the corn that was picked that morning and wastes not a day between picking and pot.  Corn, I think, is the most susceptible of veggies to losing its natural sweetness with the passing of each hour and a day is well, too much.

What I also like about the produce that grows in earth is that the tastes vary according to the soil its grown in.   Tomatoes grown in the Fraser Valley taste different from those grown in Lillooet.They are both to die for.  The greenhouse tomato that is grown in metro Vancouver tastes the same as the one that is grown in Arizona or New Brunswick.  It is the malling of agriculture … you know how mega malls all have the same designer stores.

I love the earthy smell of freshly tilled soil in the spring.  This year we have had a warm winter.  Already the farmers are tilling the soil.  Birds flock to feast on worms and whatever else it is that freshly tilled soil exposes.  I love this ritual – sort of like the rites of spring and therefore of nature and life.

But life changes – I don’t know about nature.  Every year as I go past familiar farms it seems that their numbers are decreasing.  If it’s not yet another housing development then it’s another greenhouse.

To me they look ugly.  They are a blight on the landscape.  The trend is to plant a thick and wide belt of trees running alongside the roadway between the pavement and the glass – out of sight, out of mind.  They tell us that greenhouses are only allowed to be constructed on farm soil that is poor and not suitable for traditional farming.

We live in a rich and fertile valley fed by the mighty Fraser River.  For more than a century families have  farmed the black earth of these lands and still do today but their numbers seem to be not as many.

I had no idea there was so much of this land that was not suited for farming.