New Friends, Old Friends, Red Fish, Blue Fish

Make new friends, but keep the old.
One is silver, and the other, gold.

It's a song that many of you know, and my mom used to sing all the time to me whenever I would come home from elementary school and explain to her that I'd lost or gained a friend. This happened with an alarming frequency, and usually with very little notice. Luckily, this has somewhat ceased to happen, as we are all quite mature now, but somehow the song still continues to creep me out. In fact, if you chant it softly to yourself while rocking back and forth, it sounds exactly like something straight out of A Clockwork Orange. Yeuch.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, friends.
Having had the distinct blessing this night to reune with two of my older compatriots, and do a little more bonding with a fellow dweller (who shall remain unnamed because she reads this blog, and I just like to be sneaky) I was faced with the opportunity --some might say for disaster, as it often is-- of uniting the two sides of the bridge if you will, in an attempt to hold on to all that is good in life.
Introducing your old friends to your new ones is always a tricksy business. For one thing, your new friends will undoubtedly find some of your behavior a little strange, as you revert back to your comfortable oddities in the presence of those who have seen it all before. Then, there are the inside jokes that you simply haven't had much time to cultivate and therefore aren't as plentiful with the amgos nuevos. This can cause a lot of awkward tension, if you're not careful to explain where needed and gloss over gracefully when more information on the subject would inevitably be TOO much information. Although, sometimes you just can't help yourself, and things spill out that are either regrettable or shocking, make you want to take back your past when viewed through the eyes of an objective observer, or maybe a little of all three.
One good thing about new friends is that they tend to have a much better opinion of you than the old ones do. Of course, new friends weren't there that time when you took off most of your clothes at a 7-11 gas station and posed for photos, nor will they ever see those photos because you've long since destroyed them. They also weren't there the time you fed toothpaste cookies to a mortal enemy. They share none of your guilt (or, in some cases triumph) for the crazy shennanagins you've had.
Old friends sometimes forget to call you for long periods of time, but for some reason the history seems to make up for it. In a way it's almost like meeting someone new, but then three minutes later someone brings up a story and it's like you never left. Or they never did.

Basically, all I'm trying to say is that the creepy song is as true today as it was in the yoreness of peanut butter sandwiches and noon naptimes. New friends and old friends are both like unto precious metals. They should be harvested from their natural habitat, burned until they are unrecognizable and then hammered into something shiny and used as pretty accessories. And even though mixing silver and gold is SO 1980s and currently fashion feaux pas, you should do it anyway, because it's fun.