Under My Umbrella

When I first heard Rihanna's "Umbrella", I thought it was a catchy little ditty, but I didn't pay much attention to the lyrics. However, a good friend of mine e-mailed me Mandy Moore's version of Umbrella and I fell in love with it. As I was driving home from Saskatoon today, I started listening to the words more closely. If you have no intentions of clicking on the link to watch Mandy Moore sing "Umbrella" here's a snippet of the words that got my wheels turning:

When the sun shines

We’ll shine together

Told you I'd be here forever

Said I'd always be your friend

Took an oath

And I'd stick it out 'til the end

Now that it's raining more than ever

Know that we still have each other

You can stand under my Umbrella

These lyrics got me thinking about friends and all the different forms in which they can appear.

• There are the friends who you bump into at the supermarket, you chat about kids and anything in your life that is new and remotely interesting and then maybe top off the conversation with a joke about the weather and a promise to go for coffee real soon. These are the friends that you probably wouldn't even offer your umbrella.
  

• Then, there are the friends that you actually talk to on the phone every couple of months (or, in this day and age, maybe I should say e-mail) where you catch up on each other's lives with a little more depth than the supermarket chat, but not too deeply because this is not that kind of friend. You don't show too much of your vulnerable side to this friend (minus that time you may have gotten super drunk and started bawling about how you can't live up to everyone's expectations of you, but then you had the bright idea to eat the worm out of the tequila bottle which led you to perform a short River Dance jig on the edge of the deck and subsequently fell into the hedge 6 feet below, but that was an awkward moment for everyone involved and no one's ever spoken of it again). These are the friends that you might loan your umbrella to for a weekend camping trip.

• Next, there are the friends that you speak to on a regular basis and they know absolutely everything about you. They know where you went to elementary school, they know how old you were when you first kissed someone, they know about that time you cheated on the ninth grade science final. They have been there when you needed them. They were right there beside you as you puked your guts out from your first big drunk. They were at your door the moment you needed them because you had just been dumped for the first time. They were the first one you called moments after your fiance proposed. These are the kinds of friends who know everything about you...and they still love you. These are the friends that you let stand under your umbrella.

• Lastly, there are the types of friends who show up only once in a lifetime. They are the friends who may not have been there through all your awkward growing-up phase, and yet somehow, they still know everything about you. They know what you are thinking before you even know what you are thinking. You can communicate an entire thought with a wink of your eye. Although you may never have fallen off a deck in a drunken stupor in front of them, they have seen you at your most vulnerable. These are the friends that support you, no matter what decisions you make. These are the friends that are with you, even when you're far apart. These are the friends that love you no matter what. These are the friends that tell you to smarten up and get the hell out of the rain.

And so it 'ella ella' goes...