You've got a friend - Have you?

When I was growing up and some 'friend' of mine visited my home, my father would invariably ask me who was by the door - and I would innocently tell him that a fried!! My father would just smile and always told me that he wasn't a friend but just an acquaintance or a mere class fellow. But I would shrug his advice for everyone in the class or a few whom I interacted frequently looked friends to me and I held them very dearly to me. 

But as I started to grow, the wisdom of my father's explanation of the term friend started to dawn on me. And I started to realize that friendship is a stronger form of interpersonal bond than an association, that cannot be established with everyone who comes across one's life.  And friends are the best people that hold on to our lives, specially our past together. They help us to understand where we have come across and what once mattered.


This I started to realize as most of my 'friends' faded away as we changed schools - never to come across again my life. And in the meanwhile a few more friends added - though this time more carefully and selectively. But with the passage of time, the number thinned and now at this juncture of my life, I should know say I have more than a couple whom I can call my friends as time teaches us how to be a friend and how to make one.

And talking of friends, in the early 70s, there appeared a voice, quite different from the rest, singing a song: You've got a friend - and in the song unfolded the reality of who could be a friend in very simple words by James Tyler. There are few singers who get famous on just one song and for the rest of their lives, that one song become synonymous to their names. James may have sang a thousand songs, but with his name, one song comes in one's memory and its nostalgia never dies. Each word of the song explains who a friend - a true friend could be.

While trying to select the video of the song, first I wanted to share the original song sung by James Tyler, but these were mostly audios or without audience. And luckily I found the video below which also had a live audience, although the song was sung decades later when James had grown old - but so had his audience.  I am sharing screen shots of some of the faces who were found listening to James so intently and perhaps recalling the days of their youth when they must have listened to James Tyler in their teens - and their facer expressions reveal the love of recalling the nostalgia of teenage.

Now listen to the beautiful song with captivating lyrics James Tyler sang for the audience who has since grown along with him who listened to the song when he sang it for the first time:

Songs are many - but only a few leave a lasting impression on us. You've got a friend has been such a song that reverberates in my memory lane even after I first heard it almost five decades now - and I listen to it with a nostalgia for I have lost a couple of very good friends of mine forever. 
Photo Friendship: Pixabay

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