The other night I was waiting for the renters to show up, and saw a car come whisking up to the front door. It was my friend Diane, who came up to escape from her stressful family life in the hot city.

We spent some time looking for fish in the river, and then I made some French dip sandwiches and we had a nice chat.

She was talking about someone I've never heard of as if I knew them, but I didn't want to admit it, because I think it's rude to interrupt someone's story by telling them you have no idea what they are talking about, unless it gets out of hand. At one point she said something that indicated to me we were getting warm - something about where they lived. 'Now I'll finally figure it out,' I was thinking, and sure enough she gave me enough of a clue to put it all together. It was good enough to know in general who we were talking about and we moved on to other topics with her none the wiser.

The next topic was the road trip she went on last winter, driving to Texas and back with her daughter, just on a whim. She told me that she kept expecting me to call her cell phone just to say hello while they were on the road. There is no precedent for this: I never call her. We communicate via email, but that's it. So I was really surprised that she expected this and was a little bit disappointed. Now mind you, it apparently did not occur to her to call me from the road.

She explained that many years ago she managed a fishing camp in Wisconsin for the summer. They had canoes on the lake there and one night the moon was especially nice, so she wanted to go for a canoe ride, but not alone. She fully expected someone to come along and go out with her, just waited and waited and nobody came. Finally she went home, and told her husband she'd been waiting. But of course she hadn't told anyone she expected it, she figured they would use some kind of intuition to sense it and act on it. All these 40 years later Diane's husband still teases about that: "Is this one of those canoe moments?"

I think a big part of friendship is just listening to people, letting them ramble on and don't try to outdo them or go on and on or give advice; sometimes we don't want advice, we just need a sympathetic listener. Hopefully, some day when I have something to say, they will listen to me and not make judgements or offer unwanted advice.