Three ENFP's growing old together

Pat, holding her dog Ginger, and Rene and I have had a tradition of celebrating our birthdays together that has been going on now for a few decades. When I went birthday present shopping this week for Rene, I found the hat she is wearing in the photo. Rene is rarely seen without a hat, so when she arrived at our get together wearing a lovely hat that matched her outfit, Pat and I insisted she take off her tasteful hat and wear this goofy one. She was more than willing and looked so cute in the hat I thought we might make wearing the hat a new part of our birthday tradition. That is if Rene is willing to share. She always says that when I borrow something from her I never give it back so she is always reluctant to let me borrow anything. (Yes, sometimes the three of us have been known to behave and fight like sisters.) Sometimes it is nice in life to be able to pick who you want for your sisters.

When the three of us met in our twenties each of us was just starting out in our careers. Rene joined Northwest Airlines, Pat began a medical editing career at the University of Minnesota and then moved to McGraw Hill publishing and I began teaching in Minneapolis. We were and still are very different from each other. Each of us did however stay with the same careers at the same places for all our working lives of 30 plus years and we stayed with each other. Nowadays most people have different careers and work for many different companies during their lifetimes and you are perhaps lucky to have friends that have been at your side for most of your life. The three of us are technically retired now, although Pat is freelance editing for Mayo Clinic, Rene is involved in volunteer work and other creative projects and I am busy trying to re-invent myself after a two year teaching gig in Mexico. (Wish me luck on that one!)

Our threesome has weathered life's storms; marriages that went bad, ridiculous boyfriends, bouts of depression, jobs that were sometimes unbearable, the deaths of our parents and the challenges of raising children and dogs. Through the good times and the bad times we supported each other. We have taken trips together, celebrated holidays together and chatted on the phone giving and taking advice for many an hour and became godparent and "auntie" to each other's children. Somehow when we get together we don't feel the need for any extraneous entertainment or activity. Men may need an activity like playing poker, racquetball or golf to cement their friendships, but all the three of us ever needed was the time to talk to each other about everything while we drank coffee or sipped tea and ate good food, be it take-out or homemade. I have always attributed our enjoyment of each other, our synchronicity, to the the fact that our Myers Brigg's personality configurations are the same, ENFP's. (extrovert, intuitive, feeling, perception) Of course I believe in astrology too, so I know you will not take me too seriously on that insight.

Our ability and love of talking endlessly with each other, as extroverts are known to do, has meant we can be counted on to cover a wide variety of interesting and controversial subjects. The good part about this is that each of us also knows how to listen and not just talk, a trait not always characteristic of extroverts, but pretty much true of us when we are together. We know each other very well after all these years, yet we continue to learn new things about one another probably because we all make a point of listening when one of us needs to be heard. We also love to poke fun at each other and laugh at our idiosyncrasies. I was gone for nearly two years, missing these two dearly and it felt as if I had never been gone at all as we celebrated Rene's birthday last week. I told Harry I would be back in a couple hours, a couple hours turned into nearly four hours. Typical.

I hope we will be blessed with many more birthdays the three of us can celebrate together maybe taking turns wearing the silly hat as we march or begin to tottle through the next decade of our sixties. It's always good to laugh. Getting old needs to be a bit funny. I will promise to give the hat back to Rene if she lets me wear it at my birthday party in October when I turn 60. Sisters have to share you know! Oh, did I mention that I am younger than my two sisters? With my other sisters I always have to be the oldest, that has been a chore. It's more fun to be the baby in the family and that's possible when you choose two new sisters who are older than you are.