As the Age of Abundance comes to a close, one thing people need not reduce is the number of their friends, though they might want to consider it anyway.  On social networking sites people have 300, 400 friends.   I congratulate them and I don’t doubt at all the ability to manage all those friends.   Me?  I list them differently.  I count them on one hand.

My aunt Marion used to say if, by the end of your life, you can count your good friends on one hand, you are truly blessed.  And she should know.  As a young woman, Marion was a novice in the Convent of the Roman Catholic Church.  She’s closest to God of anyone I know and if she says five friends are enough it’s probably because He told her.  That’s good enough for me.

Friends are different from acquaintances and colleagues and buddies.  You run into acquaintances in restaurants, at large parties; you usually don’t invite them to the wedding.   Colleagues are great alliances for office gossip.  You agree the boss is definitely wrecking the place and you share a fiendish laugh about it, but once you’re home you switch right to family and don’t think of your fellow worker until the next day.   And buddies, they’re wonderful for a game of golf or a bike ride.  After you’re done sweating, you grab a bite to eat and you go your separate ways until the next play date comes up.

Friends carry you through your own life.  They celebrate your successes, they absorb your sadness, they strategize so you can have the deepest, most meaningful life you deserve.   They see things clearly that you can’t see at all because you’re too close to your own existence.  And their greatest gift may be in wisely knowing it is not their job to judge and push, but to witness and encourage.

I am fortunate to have tremendous people in my life and they number more than the fingers on my hand, but the very closest five are there by one measure.  If I asked any one of them to fly immediately to Alaska, no questions asked,  I am confident they would do it.  And I would do it for them.  Even in January.

For now, I try to ask for a little less.  That they are always available for me to selfishly grab too much of their time with my issues and interests, I am one of the lucky ones who can count my good friends on only one hand.

Sometimes the news is darn depressing.  And it doesn’t have to be a gigantic event like the World Trade Center attack or the Christmas Tsunami to bring on despair.  It can be the report about the family pet who died outside the burning home even after firefighters fashioned some sort of mouth-to-snout resuscitation.  Or the elderly man who wandered away from his home and was found frozen to death in the woods just beyond his back yard.   Sad tale upon sad tale, every night on the TV news.

You’d think it would drive the news staff crazy to be subjected to this as a line of work, but it’s really the opposite.  I’m living proof that news anchors and reporters really are crazy, but in this way, they’re the sanest people around and we can all learn something by their example.

As anchor of the evening news on WTVH-TV in Syracuse, New York for nearly three decades, audience members  often asked me if I got depressed reporting so much sadness and crime every night.  The answer was no.  I had therapists all around me in the form of other anchors.

Once the commercial hit, we started started talking about everything that wasn’t the news.  Sometimes it was our plan for the dinner hour, but many times, it was about what we had just watched on the program.  We talked and we shared.  Sometimes we got momentarily weepy, often we were outraged, but we always got it out.

We did the weather segment, and then the sports segment, but as those commercials kept coming  so did our feelings.  By the time we got home to our families we were all talked out.  No more anger and grief.  Our feelings were in their rightful place, the guy next to us.

Seriously, you can’t get stuck with something if people take it from you, and in that way my news colleagues were my therapists, and I like to believe I was theirs.  We took the stress away from each other. I used to be surprised my non-news industry friends so often felt blue about the news and now I know why.  Without the benefit of the other anchor and the meteorologist and the sports guy, the news can really get to you.

So if you feel down about what’s happening in the world, and you can’t find a news anchor, or a weatherman or a sports guy, pick up the phone and call a friend.  Tell them what you just saw and heard.  They’ll take it from you.  And if you do it quickly, you’ll still have time to catch the last story of the newscast, the one about the water-skiing squirrel in Iowa.