One of the joys of writing for a newspaper delivered right to the front door of my friends is having them thank me for something I have written.

It makes me feel good to have someone express gratitude for brightening their day or helping them through a rough patch.

No sooner had a recent issue of that newspaper hit the doorstep when a friend of mine caught me on a whiney Facebook post and called me on my “get to” article.

I thanked her for politely redirecting my perspective and immediately posted something from a new outlook on the day.

That friend is what I like to call a “Be-Real Buddy.”

I wonder how many people have friends who help them live their lives on purpose, on course. How many of us have friends in our lives with whom we are so real those people feel safe helping us get back on track when we, as we all do, have a bad moment, or a bad day, or worse.

I am happy to say I have actively cultivated several of these friends in recent months.

These are the kind of friends I can message in the middle of the night to tell I’m having a difficult time, and they know exactly what to say.

The kind of friends I can privately tell I am trying to write a positive post for my page and I’m just not feeling it, because sometimes, let’s be honest, real life is grey clouds, ice storms and achy bones. These friends help me see and feel light again.

In today’s fast-paced technological society, much of our communication is electronic.

We text or message a large portion of our conversations. This has spawned an entire new vocabulary to speed up communication.

They call it “text talk” or “message jargon.” It is filled with abbreviations and acronyms that can drive a person crazy trying to decipher correspondence if they’re not up on the shorthand.

We use things like TTYL, LOL, OMG, IDK, JK, BFF and so on to quickly make a point. (If you don’t know what these mean, ask anyone born after 1980 or go online for your complete dictionary of text message abbreviations. Yes, really!)

The last acronym listed above is short for “best friends, forever.” This phrase gets tossed around very loosely these days. It can mean your dog, an acquaintance at school or literally someone you have been close to since you were a little kid.

Unfortunately, I have watched people change those upon whom they confer this status as often as some people change their sheets. Those of us old enough to actually have BFFs are unlikely to use this expression in daily communication.

The truth is, once we get older, we learn to value healthy relationships with people who are real and who keep us real – Be-Real Buddies.

I thought we would abbreviate these people as BRBs.

Unfortunately that abbreviation has already been assigned to “Be Right Back.”

Well, I have decided to use it to also identify this special kind of friend in my communication.

I propose those of us old enough to value this type of friendship appropriate this acronym. It will completely baffle two entire generations, but since when did that stop progress?

From now on, in my abbreviated communication of texts and other messaging, BRB will identify the very best kind of friends in my life, the ones with whom I can be real, who can be real with me, and who keep me real.

The BRBs in my life honor the BRBs in your life. May you have many. Namaste’.

 

Debbie Lee Townsend is a Hawkins resident. If you’d like to submit a column for YES!, just email it to yes@tylerpaper.com.